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DALÍ & I

Name: DALÍ & I
Author: Stan Lauryssens
ISBN: 978-0-312-37993-3

THE SURREAL STORY

by Stan Lauryssens ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008

Crass, callous, sordid and cynical—thus, utterly true to the spirit of Dalí and a certain bestseller. Already in the works,...

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Melting clock of a memoir about the author’s experiences selling Dalí works—some authentic, many not—during those heady recent decades when the merest splatter or signature attributed to the Spanish artist was as hot as a subprime mortgage.

He’s telling things the way he remembers them, declares convicted Belgian conman turned author Lauryssens (The Man Who Invented the Third Reich, 1999, etc.). Freeing himself from the troublesome bonds of fact by acknowledging that his myriad pages of dialogue are “recreated,” he presents his life on an impressive platter, apparently hoping that readers will attend to the fine china rather than the rancid meat it holds. If the author is to be trusted (beware: He conned buyers virtually to the end), he was plucked as a young man from a cheese factory to be a Hollywood reporter for Panorama, a Belgian weekly. He never went to California; instead, he fabricated stories, including an apocryphal interview with Dalí that launched him onto the fast lane of the fine-art freeway. Working for a man with the ethics of a starving predator, Lauryssens was soon passing himself off as a Dalí authority and making major bucks in numerous art swindles. The gullible arrived like eager sheep, according to the author, who writes fondly of the lavish lifestyle they enabled him to enjoy. He jetted about and stayed in multistar hotels. He married a nice woman; it didn’t last. He sired some children, professing to love them as he was hauled off to jail. He found himself in the circle of Dalí intimates, who shared with him their stories of rampant forgery and the artist’s notorious sex circuses. Readers beware: The language is explicit in this wild and woolly account; we learn what devices were put into which people under what conditions.

Crass, callous, sordid and cynical—thus, utterly true to the spirit of Dalí and a certain bestseller. Already in the works, a film with Al Pacino and Cillian Murphy: scary.

Pub Date: July 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-312-37993-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)