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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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