A delightful and most welcome contribution to the field of Whistler scholarship and to our knowledge of 19th-century art and culture. The American-born expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (18341903) has long defied easy categorization. During his lifetime, Whistler bridged the enormously different art worlds of London and Paris. British scholars Anderson and Koval, in their splendid account of Whistler's life and work, situate the artist's achievements within this social and cultural milieu, documenting their subject's relation to the significant artistic currents of the day. In London, as a major proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, he was at theoretical odds with the Victorian mainstream, yet he desperately sought acceptance from the Royal Academy and other official institutions. Whistler found a more receptive atmosphere in Paris, where his friends and supporters included MallarmÇ, Degas, Manet, and Monet. But Whistler, whose art was superficially related to Impressionism, remained somewhat isolated by the uniqueness of his artistic approach. As the title suggests, the intention of the authors is to present a revisionist account of Whistler's life and work. In this they succeed. Previous biographies, as they rightly point out, have been weakened by their focus on mythological accounts of Whistler's life, many perpetuated by the artist himself. While never indulging in trendy psychobiography, Anderson and Koval give us a sense of both the private Whistler and his carefully crafted public persona, candidly discussing the insecure artist's need to edit or alter the facts of his life and his impulse to court public controversy. Ever the PR man, Whistler waged aesthetic battles in the press: His trial with John Ruskin and his falling-out with Oscar Wilde are legendary. This volume, marked by distinguished scholarship, level- headedness, and fine narrative style, goes a long way toward setting the record straight. (24 pages illustrations, 8 in color, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0187-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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