The narrative moves along smoothly enough, though the author’s obsession with his subject’s sex life becomes tedious. The...
Pulitzer-winning historian McFeely (Proximity to Death, 1999, etc.) offers a sturdy, well-written consideration of the eccentric artist who may or may not have been a homosexual.
Haunted and fascinated by the inherent sadness and searing beauty of later works by Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), the author delves into the man’s psyche to reveal an immensely talented painter tortured by chronic depression and “bedeviled” by ambiguous sexuality—a trait McFeely continuously orbits without ultimately arriving at a definitive answer. He portrays Eakins as an impassioned, “subversive” educator whose unconventional preoccupation with anatomy and photography were only two of the interests that made the administration at Philadelphia’s Academy of the Fine Arts rather wary of him. “An unorthodox and brilliant teacher and a wonderfully crazy character who was able to be totally uninhibited with his students,” Eakins treated female pupils with respect but had his most intense relationships with the men. He had been teaching for three years when he was commissioned to paint President Rutherford Hayes’s portrait, in 1877; he made his first sale of a finished work to Smith College three years later. In 1884, he married Susan Macdowell, one of his prize students. Husband and wife were “truly great friends,” states McFeely. “What precisely the nature of their sexual history with each other was, no one can be sure”—though he strongly suggests it was minimal. That same year, Eakins produced Swimming, the provocative, homoerotic masterpiece that played a role in his dismissal from the Academy of the Fine Arts in 1886. His deep depression over being fired was somewhat alleviated by a new friendship with Walt Whitman that lasted until the poet’s death. Eakins’s melancholy in later years was assuaged by sculptor (and another possible love interest) Samuel Murray.
The narrative moves along smoothly enough, though the author’s obsession with his subject’s sex life becomes tedious. The generous amount of illustrations best capture the artist’s elusive essence.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-05065-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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