A splendid biography that penetrates the inner lives of Kahn’s buildings as well as the inner life of their creator.
A new, in-depth biography of the noted American architect.
Threepenny Review founder and editor Lesser (Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, 2014, etc.) begins her stellar biography at the end, with Kahn’s death (1901-1974). At the time, the renowned architect, who was “famous for his energy,” was “tired.” He had just returned from a long overseas trip and had a heart attack in Penn Station in New York. Lesser describes Kahn as “affable, conciliatory, and a bit self-mocking,” warm and captivating but secretive (he had two affairs while married). His output was small, but his best buildings were “beautiful in a surprising new way.” Kahn came to America from Estonia in 1906 when he was 5, his young face and hands scarred from a fiery accident. Always a brilliant drawer (he was ambidextrous), he received a good education and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. In 1935, he worked on a new workers’ housing project in Washington, D.C., and soon started his own firm. In 1954, “I discovered myself after designing that little concrete-block bath house in Trenton.” Concrete and brick would forever be his favorite construction materials. Lesser punctuates the narrative with five lengthy sections of “ ‘in situ’ descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures.” The author visited them all. Included are the Salk Institute in San Diego (1959), with its enormous, distinctive plaza. It would be the “only profitable project that Kahn ever undertook.” Also included is his “most supremely beautiful accomplishment,” the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which was the biggest project he ever took on and “in many ways the most difficult.” Extensively researched, the book is full of quotes from letters and interviews, providing an intimate portrait of his personality and genius.
A splendid biography that penetrates the inner lives of Kahn’s buildings as well as the inner life of their creator.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-27997-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
