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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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