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 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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