The collection serves as a fine introduction to—and commemoration of—an incisive cultural critic.
Trenchant reflections on life and art from an award-winning critic and historian.
Hughes (1938-2012) is represented in this collection by chapters from 8 of his 13 books, along with 125 pages from his second, unfinished memoir. Outspoken and fiercely opinionated, the author had capacious interests and uncompromising standards. “What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?” he asked in The Shock of the New (1980). “Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art” could offer insights into a “radically changing culture.” In Nothing If Not Critical (1990), a collection of his reviews for Time magazine, for which he served as chief art critic for more than 30 years, Hughes praises John Singer Sargent (“there is virtue in virtuosity”); acknowledges Whistler’s many faults (he was “an egomaniac, a fop, and a publicity-crazed liar”) but finds his work impressive; extols Pollock’s brilliance; and offers a long piece on the “voracious” publicity-seeker Warhol, who, he believed, pandered to “the age of supply-side aesthetics.” Chapters from Barcelona (1992) and Rome (2011) show Hughes engaging an expansive physical and cultural landscape. In his first memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), he gives a harrowing account of a car accident that he barely survived. For more than five weeks, he was in a “semiconscious delirium,” experiencing “narrative phantasms of extreme clarity and unshakeable, Dalíesque vividness.” Hughes recalls his childhood in Sydney, Australia, where he reveled in the family library without the distraction of “that jabbering moronic babysitter,” the TV. The author’s unfinished chapters include an homage to his friend Robert Rauschenberg, recollections of living on Shelter Island, a satirical report of his tryout for the ABC news show 20/20, and a moving essay on the suicide of his son and his failures as a father.
The collection serves as a fine introduction to—and commemoration of—an incisive cultural critic.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4445-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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