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THE FELLOWSHIP

THE UNTOLD STORY OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE TALIESIN FELLOWSHIP

Compelling, but often gets lost in its myriad details.

Sprawling portrait of Wright’s Depression-era Wisconsin arts colony shows the genius at work amid a dizzying succession of admirers.

Cultural sociologist Friedland (Religious Studies/UC Santa Barbara) and Los Angeles–based architect Zellman fashion a crowded look at the bold, unorthodox workers’ collective created in 1932 by Wright and his Montenegrin third wife. Taliesin, named after a legendary Welsh bard, already had a complicated, tragic history. Wright’s mother purchased the land in 1911; her son constructed a house there intended as his latest contribution to distinctively American architecture, as well as a home for the architect and Mamah Cheney, the married woman for whom he had left his first wife and their children in 1909. Briefly installed at the newly built compound, Mamah and her children were axe-murdered by a disgruntled Wright employee in 1914 while escaping from the fire he had started. Wright rebuilt Taliesin, married and divorced again before meeting 27-year-old Olgivanna Hinzenberg, 30 years his junior, in 1924. A disciple of mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, who had worked in Wright’s commune outside Paris, Olgivanna thought that a similar setup at Taliesin could provide the architect with paying students and a pool of available draftsmen. The prospectus, promising an “authentic American culture,” attracted young, brilliant minds willing to pay tuition and eager to work both as apprentices and farm laborers. Notable among them were Wes Peters, who became Wright’s son-in-law and successor, and several gay men prized as “loyal sons.” (They didn’t marry, and they rebuffed the advances of the seductive Olgivanna.) From this period until his death in 1959, Wright and his Taliesin disciples created his most famous works: Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax building and the Guggenheim Museum. Their collective experiment also planted the seed for utopian communities Usonia and Broadacre City. The authors lavish pages on Gurdjieff’s ideas about “organic life,” which Wright shared, as well as portraits of all the personalities and their shenanigans.

Compelling, but often gets lost in its myriad details.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-039388-2

Page Count: 704

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.

Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

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