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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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