Entertaining yet inconclusive: the real story of the “Man Behind the Wall” will probably have to wait until the hype dies...
Graffiti meets high art in the first biographical assessment of a renowned yet anonymous figure.
Americans who didn’t follow street-art culture had probably never heard of Banksy until his 2009 documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, earned an Academy Award nomination. In Britain, however, Banksy-spotting (discovering that the artist had stenciled a cheeky design on the side of a building or bridge) became a national pastime and earned the mysterious spray painter a cult following. The tricky part started when this once-underground phenomenon moved into art galleries and began commanding staggering prices at auction. Banksy then established his own agency, Pest Control, to authenticate his works, field press inquiries and maintain his anonymity, but misunderstandings and scams abounded regardless. Former Sunday Times chief reporter Ellsworth-Jones (We Will Not Fight…The Untold Story of World War I’s Conscientious Objectors, 2008) presents a patchwork treatment of a subject who simultaneously comes across as both a likable guy with a knack for striking imagery and a control freak who delights in thwarting the aims of anyone who tries to breach his inner sanctum. Since Pest Control refused to grant the author access to Banksy, the author relies on interviews with gallery owners who sell his work for millions, graffiti artists who dismiss their rival as a sellout and devotees who have stood for hours in line to obtain limited-edition prints. Most interestingly, he spoke to a couple who live inside a trailer that Banksy painted for them: When Pest Control declined to authenticate the mural, the pair fought back and negotiated an unprecedented deal to legitimately remove and sell it, thus subverting Banksy’s ironclad control.
Entertaining yet inconclusive: the real story of the “Man Behind the Wall” will probably have to wait until the hype dies down.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02573-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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
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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