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
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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