King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last impressionist standing at the end of one of history’s most...
A vivid account of Claude Monet (1840-1926) facing his greatest artistic challenge in the last years of his life.
As King (Leonardo and the Last Supper, 2012, etc.) poignantly shows, neither failing eyesight, frail health, nor a raging war on his doorstep could stop the beloved painter. In the spring of 1914, with France on the cusp of World War I, Monet had fallen into depression after the deaths of his wife and, later, his son, but it was seemingly unthinkable that he would put away his brushes. Fortunately, his friend Georges Clemenceau, a politician and newspaper owner, convinced him to work again. In his 70s, Monet, esteemed for his paintings of haystacks, the Rouen Cathedral, and poplars, all “evocations of an essential Frenchness,” began to work on his last and most ambitious project, a series of water lily paintings that continued to obsess him until his death at 86. The collection included “forty-five to fifty panels making up fourteen separate series” (the total length was more than 200 meters), and many are now exhibited in museums worldwide. It was the apotheosis of “Monet’s decades-long obsession,” and he sometimes worked “on multiple canvases simultaneously,” rotating them to capture a particular quality in the moment. Indeed, the novelist Proust described Monet as a painter of time. King effectively puts readers at the painter’s side as he rails against the impossible task he set for himself, suffering the “tortures” of painting and slashing canvases. As in his superb The Judgment of Paris (2006), about the rise of impressionism, the author sets this fascinating portrayal of the larger-than-life artist—known equally for his “obstreperous temperament” and warm hospitality, for his love of gardening, family life, fast cars, and gourmet food—against a backdrop of the raging war, politics, history, and changing tastes in art.
King elegantly reveals the soul of a great artist, the last impressionist standing at the end of one of history’s most remarkable art movements.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-012-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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