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MARSDEN HARTLEY

THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN ARTIST

A penetrating biography of American painter Marsden Hartley, by Ludington (English and American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; The Life of John Dos Passos, 1980). Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his 19th- century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism. ``His loneliness, his peripatetic nature, his ideas, and the subjects of his paintings all stemmed in part from his homosexuality,'' Ludington argues. Born in 1877 to an English cotton-spinner, Hartley was eight when his mother died—a lethal blow to ``his fragile ego.'' He worked in a shoe factory at age 16, then a marble quarry, moving to New York in 1899 to study art. Through Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, Hartley eventually gained recognition and some success. Almost until his death in 1943, however, he was haunted by poverty and torn between rustic country and charged city, and then between Europe and America. Hartley fell under Germany's spell in 1913 as he found not only avant-garde culture but homosexual experience: Some of his strongest paintings are cubist arrangements of military symbols, inspired in part by a German soldier's death. Later, his passion for his new-found home let him rationalize Nazi oppression in ``murderously dangerous opinions.'' Ludington effectively quotes Hartley's letters, as when the artist speaks of failing to find ``the same convincing beauty'' of Kandinsky's theories in his own work, or of ``the child within me, namely the romanticist, albeit not perhaps a romance of love as of madness for the mountain.'' Though a recognized artist with works in the Museum of Modern Art, a despairing Hartley in 1935 destroyed over 100 paintings and drawings because he couldn't pay storage costs. In such details, Ludington keeps up the pace of the story—looking at the artist's ``mercurial'' inner life in far more depth than at his work. (Fifty-one b&w and 11 color photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: March 10, 1992

ISBN: 0-316-53537-0

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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