This biography of Edouard Manet (183283) captures the significance of one of modern art's founding figures. Perfectly sociable in public, Manet kept his private life intensely private. This split self is at the center of Brombert's analysis of Manet's character, but since he left few personal writings, such as letters, Brombert (Cristina: Portrait of a Princess, 1977) can do little to penetrate the artist's innermost thoughts. She does, however, chart the course of his career and its context with skill and aplomb. Manet was born into the haute bourgeoisie as it boomed under the rule of Louis-Philippe. His father, a judge, hoped he would go into law or the navy, but a gift for caricature led him to take up painting instead. An attachment to Suzanne Leenhoff, originally his piano teacher, complicated Manet's youth. Some years after Leenhoff gave birth to a son, Manet married her. And while his decision was an honorable one, his reluctance to be seen in public with her showed his determination to wall off his private life. Professionally, though, Manet took a bold stance, producing paintings whose vibrant colors and everyday subjects shocked the art establishment. Manet's colleagues and champions included Emile Zola, StÇphane MallarmÇ, Berthe Morisot, and above all, perhaps, Charles Baudelaire. Brombert's readings of important canvases, from Le DÇjeuner sur l'herbe to the Execution of Maximilian to the Bar at the Folies-Bergäre, generally shine, as do her accounts of the changing social and political environment in which Manet worked, and her informed discussions of syphilis, the disease that claimed Manet's father and then Manet himself. One does wish, however, that Brombert had placed more emphasis on the highly original idea of Manet's split self, which she introduces early on, suggesting that the incessant doubling motifs in his work reflect his character. Well researched, complexly conceived, and clearly written, Brombert's life of Manet achieves a balanced synthesis of art criticism, historical repotage, and biography. (70 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-10947-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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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