An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also...
British novelist and poet Roe (The Spitfire Factory, not reviewed, etc.) pens a well-tempered, bracing biography of the painter too often trivialized as Augustus John's sister or Auguste Rodin's lover.
Working from letters in the Musée Rodin, the Tate Archives, the New York Library, and private collections, Roe takes John (1876–1939) out of the shadows into which, it begins to seem, she has been willfully put by others. Far from being the wimpy recluse of art-history tradition, John was an important, respected, and active member of the art community in Paris during a particularly vibrant era. Emotionally, she was vulnerable: her broken affair with Rodin threw her sideways for some time, she tended to confuse “devotional love with emotional yearning,” and she displayed a “chronic need for approval of her work.” But artistically and socially she was fulfilled: her work was admired by contemporaries (including her brother); neighbors and friends included poet Rainer Maria Rilke, critic Arthur Symons, and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne. Roe builds a supple and rolling narrative from the correspondence, striving for accuracy in presentation and keeping the speculation to a minimum as she tracks John through her years in France and numerous close friendships. The author also does a smart, unadorned job of following John's evolution as a painter, from her animated early works, with their interiorist tones, to the later oblique paintings, with their misshapen subjects. A very recognizable and human picture of John emerges as a searcher for faith and love quite like Roe's description of one of her letters: “portentous, eerie, with a sustained mood of beauty in strangeness.”
An impressive portrait of a “busy, daring, and eventful life,” profoundly independent and intellectual, though also melancholic.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11317-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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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