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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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