Although reticent about putting forth her own insights about her subject’s mind and heart, Herrera gives readers an ample,...
A comprehensive biography of a sculptor of stone and space.
Art critic Robert Hughes called Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) “the pre-eminent American sculptor…the chief living heir, not only to his teacher [Constantin] Brancusi, but also to the classical Japanese feeling for material and nature.” In this meticulously researched biography, Herrera (Joan Snyder, 2005, etc.) chronicles the long, productive career of the acclaimed 20th-century modernist. Born to an unconventional American mother and a Japanese father, a famous poet who neglected him, Noguchi spent his early childhood in Japan; at 13, his mother sent him to school in America, alone. “Banished” to another culture, he claimed throughout his life that dual identity made him feel like an outsider. As an artist, he drew on both cultures, and his precocious talent attracted teachers and mentors: Brancusi, for whom he worked in Paris; and Buckminster Fuller, who taught Noguchi about “the new technology of space and structures.” Although Noguchi began his career making busts of celebrities (Thornton Wilder, George Gershwin, Lincoln Kirstein), he soon moved to sculpture, stage sets (he designed for Martha Graham for decades), and public plazas and gardens (for UNESCO, Yale’s Beinecke Library and others), earning a reputation “as a sculptor of space.” Herrera allows colleagues and lovers to characterize Noguchi's personality. “He was elegant and flirtatious,” a close woman friend disclosed. “He was a seducer and a charmer.” He pursued women who were usually decades younger and dazzled by his attentions and his fame; he married one, an actress, but that relationship ended in divorce after a few years. Short-tempered and egotistical, he could be difficult. One colleague said he was “stubborn as a mule” and an astute politician. “Noguchi was a genius in knowing how to use people,” said another.
Although reticent about putting forth her own insights about her subject’s mind and heart, Herrera gives readers an ample, thorough analysis of his estimable art.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-28116-8
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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