Still, 15 years later, he fails to thoughtfully analyze what his drive for the grand scale ultimately meant.
A backbiting, freewheeling account of irrevocably shaking up the country's leading museum—told at breakneck speed by former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Hoving (Discovery, 1989, etc.).
"From the moment I leaped out of my city limousine and dashed up the steps of the Met, I was picking the place apart.'' The brash, publicity-seeking scholar and former N.Y.C. parks commissioner began his ten-year reign in 1967; during it, the museum repeatedly made front-page news. It bought Velazquez's Juan de Pareja secretly at auction for over $5 million, and purchased a vase by Euphronios allegedly robbed from an Italian tomb. It "deaccessioned'' paintings, including a van Gogh, and the catalogue for the "Harlem on my Mind'' show was so inflammatory that it was withdrawn. Hoving's vision for the museum as "a living forum for communication and teaching and education and celebration'' meant doubling its size, mounting blockbuster shows, acquiring "the big, rare, fantastic pieces, the expensive ones, the ones that would cause a splash.'' Crowded with rich trustees and erratic art-world figures, the museum's backstage, as depicted here, is as ugly as any. "To survive,'' Hoving argues, "a director had to be'' not just "scholar [and] aesthete'' but "part gunslinger, ward heeler, legal fixer, toady.'' In fact, from the evidence here, those roles seemed Hoving's choice. And though he takes the blame for many "disasters,'' he attributes them to his backing down on a master plan that was, despite criticisms of grandiosity, finally "too little and too cowardly.'' Leading the public to the Met's keyhole, Hoving reveals that his directorship had much to do with intrigue, money and power.
Still, 15 years later, he fails to thoughtfully analyze what his drive for the grand scale ultimately meant.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-73854-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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
SEEN & HEARD
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