by Thomas Hoving ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1993
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paintings, including a van Gogh, and the catalogue for the "Harlem on my Mind'' show was so inflammatory that it was withdrawn.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
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BOOK REVIEW
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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