Bernier's first book is a reshaping of her slide and lecture series often given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere. The author, wife of art critic John Russell and founding editor of L'OEil, writes splendidly of her three artists on a personal level and covers a lot of ground artistically without ever getting in very deep or stopping for a rich examination of the works at hand. She always charms, however, especially when revealing lost treasures that she discovered firsthand. (The book's 350 illustrations, including 200 color, seen largely in b&w photocopy, give every indication of being knockouts.) Despite moments of evident warmth the artists showed her, Bernier's day-to- day reminiscences of her three heroes reinforce what we already know of them, and at times bring these men popping off the page with a line or two of dialogue without offering fresh insight into their work. Her stories cover the first 20 years in France following WW II, when her magazine was at its peak (it changed hands in 1969) and when, through her ``genius for friendship'' (as her husband puts it), she was gathering fresh material for L'OEil. Perhaps her biggest strike was a big cache of Picasso works the painter had left with his family in Barcelona 50 years earlier and that he directed her tomany were black with grime but when cleaned revealed the teenage artist's astounding facility as a realist. Bernier's most captivating passage about Matisse concerns the bedridden artist's slowly evolving plans and inspiration for the Chapelle de Sainte-Marie-du-Rosaire at Vence and the sudden impetus to his work that thoughts of stained-glass windows in strong sunlight gave him. Mir¢ tells her about his painting of The Farm, which turned out to be too big for any dealer to sell; the young Hemingway bought it ``for pennies, but he liked it a lot.'' A moveable feast. Clear off the coffee table.*justify no*
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58670-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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