by Steven M. Nesbit ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2013
Short on art-historical substance, but nevertheless, a valuable record of an overlooked artist.
An introduction to a forgotten Russian painter and his work.
Nesbit, in his debut, begins this first-ever scholarly treatment of Ivan Garikow’s work by recounting the opening of a Florida storage locker. Garikow’s paintings, as well as his cremated remains, were in the locker, which narrowly escaped the eerily named Hurricane Ivan, which tore through Florida in 2004. The tale of a neglected artist’s work languishing in storage is sadly familiar, and Garikow’s life story is similarly grim. He was born in rural poverty in 1918 and later was all but homeless as a student at Leningrad’s Repin Academy; he went on to become a Nazi prisoner during World War II. He had a brief period of relative success and stability in Salzburg after the war—state commissions, marriage, a child—but his decision to emigrate to the United States and pursue the American dream proved to be his undoing. Nesbit effectively relates Garikow’s personal history, bleak as it is, as the artist became one of Philadelphia’s many lost souls in the 1970s. When the book strives for more than biography, however, it’s less successful. Nesbit acknowledges the contributions of Brittany E. Ober, the art historian of the Garikow Project, and praises her establishment of a catalog and body of scholarship for Garikow’s paintings. However, the book isn’t organized like a traditional catalogue raisonné; instead, it provides an idiosyncratic, perplexing array of tables, appendices and uncaptioned images. The analysis is uneven at best, varying from elementary-level art education (“Historically, male artists painted portraits…of the women they most admired physically, or loved”) to oblique name-dropping (“He uses Manet-like brushstrokes in the water”). The paintings themselves are also uneven in quality, but there are some gems, particularly the city- and landscapes. A broader treatment—more deeply mining Garikow’s academic experience at Repin, the tension between Garikow’s approach and dominant trends in postwar American art, and the tastes of Garikow’s patrons and promoters—would have served these works better.
Short on art-historical substance, but nevertheless, a valuable record of an overlooked artist.Pub Date: May 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478335849
Page Count: 164
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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