An elegantly written, rewardingly exhaustive survey of the life, work, and world of the 17th-century Dutch master. Schama (Landscape and Memory, 1995, etc.) has produced a work of breathtaking ambition in which he tackles history, biography, religion, commerce, and art. He meticulously surveys Rembrandt’s work, describing in lucid detail the paintings, the painter, and the painter’s world. Since the young Rembrandt was so influenced by the older Peter Paul Rubens, Schama extensively analyzes Rubens’ own life and work. Schama also describes how the Protestant Reformation devastated Holland. Catholic Spain held Holland as part of its Empire, and terrorized those who sought Dutch independence in politics or religion. “In Holland in the late 1620s,” notes Schama, “Scripture was politics.” Rembrandt’s native Leiden, a hotbed of Calvinist theology, was especially rife with violent religious schisms. Meanwhile, Leiden was growing rich from the textile trade. Many of Rembrandt’s early patrons were wealthy merchants who viewed art as a means of showing off their success and exalting their character. Later, Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where the merchants were even richer. Schama takes us on a chronological tour of Rembrandt’s work, providing illuminating commentaries and fitting each painting into the artist’s overall development. Schama knows his art history, especially Rembrandt’s crucial role: “Rembrandt’s economy of eloquence was of a piece with his approach to history painting, where he had already stripped away the clutter of detail distracting from the essential core of a narrative.” Rejecting the elaborate flourishes of the Italian masters, Rembrandt became the subtlest, most intimately interior painter of his time. The breathtaking expressiveness of his details and his eloquence in slight shadings of light and color make viewing Rembrandt’s work an unforgettable experience. For those trying to understand Rembrandt and his art, this book—combining dispassionate scholarship with an obvious delight in its subject’s brilliance—is simply a must.
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 1999
ISBN: O-679-40256-X
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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