A profusely illustrated, deeply thoughtful meditation on art.
An obsession with Pieter Bruegel the Elder elicits a vibrant portrait of the artist’s work and world.
Ferris, creator of the web-based Anatomy of Norbiton, which he describes as “essays on suburban life and universal failure as seen through the lens of Renaissance art,” makes his book debut with a captivating chronicle of his journeys to collections around the world in search of paintings by Bruegel. In 2012, the 42-year-old author became overwhelmed by “a mania for Bruegel,” incited by Landscape With the Fall of Icarus—not an authentic Bruegel, he discovered, but more likely a copy—which he saw at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels. “Why Bruegel?, why all of it? and why now?”: Ferris never fully answers those questions as he embarks on his quest, revealing only that at the time he felt at loose ends, “on the payroll of a dying software company,” and working mostly at home, tinkering with Anatomy of Norbiton. Tracking down works by Bruegel gave him “a defined and manageable project.” Ferris does not explain why he juxtaposes his insights into Bruegel’s work with a memoir about his father, an engineer who worked for the General Electric Company and who died in 2009. The author portrays his father with affection but strains to connect him to Bruegel. Documentary evidence for his father’s life is scant, Ferris admits, consisting of a few methodically kept lists; similarly, for Bruegel, there is “only the vivid remnant flesh of the paintings and drawings and engravings.” The author illuminates those works with an astute, knowing eye and penetrating insight, admiring Bruegel’s precision in rendering scenes of peasant life: “the marginalized, the outcast, the strange,” whom the artist depicted “not necessarily with sympathy”; or “the great theatre of suffering,” such as bear-baiting, “which kept the sixteenth century amused.” Along with reflections on artworks, Ferris shares sharp, often amusing details of ambience, hotels, trains, meals, and much beer in each city he visits.
A profusely illustrated, deeply thoughtful meditation on art.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293175-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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