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THE FELLOWSHIP

Name: THE FELLOWSHIP
Author: Roger Friedland
ISBN: 0-06-039388-2

THE UNTOLD STORY OF FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT AND THE TALIESIN FELLOWSHIP

by Roger Friedland & Harold Zellman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2006

Compelling, but often gets lost in its myriad details.

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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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)