A treat for fans of off-the-beaten-track places as well as odd corners of art history.
Pleasantly spun tale of a museum with an unlikely history—and collection.
Located some 100 miles east of Portland, Oregon, the Maryhill Museum (dedicated in 1926) contains an offbeat assemblage of artifacts, ranging from Native American crafts to a lock of Queen Victoria’s hair, a huge collection of chess sets, and 87 pieces by Auguste Rodin. That all these things, plus a full-size concrete replica of Stonehenge, should be in the same remote place speaks to the strange genius of Sam Hill, who, retired journalist Wiegand writes, “depending on whom you asked…was either a visionary or crazier than an outhouse rat.” A world traveler and railroad executive, Hill built a 5,300-acre Shangri-La, with a palatial home intended for a mentally ill daughter, along the banks of the Columbia River while planning “quixotic” projects such as a peace arch spanning the border of the U.S. and Canada. Into his orbit had fallen Queen Marie of Romania, who boasted, “I am said to be the most beautiful woman in Europe,” and whose friend Loie Fuller, an actress and dancer whose “life overflowed with exclamation points,” convinced Hill to turn that home into a museum. Fuller used her connections with French artists such as Rodin to fill the place with art, using funds contributed by another partner. Fuller herself had been hospitalized for mental troubles, and everyone involved had colorful histories, but somehow everything came together. Beyond the founders, the Maryhill Museum survived but never exactly thrived: Its “nearly nonexistent acquisitions budget” required it to be innovative without becoming, Wiegand writes, “the kind of roadside tourist trap that parked a covered wagon on the lawn and sold grape Slushies at the ticket booth.” As the author observes, the museum endures, though it derives more of its revenue from the sale of alfalfa and wind power than from ticket sales.
A treat for fans of off-the-beaten-track places as well as odd corners of art history.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61088-494-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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