The prose is workmanlike, but Ardizzone (American Studies/Notre Dame) makes an important contribution by bringing Greene’s...
Thorough biography of the intriguing woman who organized financier J.P. Morgan’s rare books and illuminated manuscripts.
Born in 1879 in Washington, D.C., Greene hailed from a genteel lineage of free African-Americans; in 1870, her father, Richard Greener, was the first black man to graduate from Harvard. Beautiful and dusky-skinned, she had passed since childhood as white (a subject also explored by Ardizzone and co-author Earl Lewis in Love on Trial, 2001). Greene had a scant three years’ experience at the Princeton University Library when she was referred to Morgan by his nephew Junius in 1906. She was not intimidated by the gruff ways of her famous employer, who charged her with making his new library preeminent. With Greene’s help, he would make spectacular purchases, such as a William Caxton edition of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur, and in no time she was enjoying invitations and European travel among the wealthy. In this high milieu, she met and fell in love with art critic Bernard Berenson (advisor to Morgan’s rival, collector Isabella Stewart Gardner), with whom she carried on a decades-long affair tacitly approved by his wife, Mary. Though Greene encouraged many other flirtations and affairs over the years, she never married, and she supported her mother and sisters her whole life. She inherited $50,000 when Morgan died in 1913, but continued in her role at the library under son Jack Morgan. He realized Greene’s dream of making the collection accessible to everyone by incorporating the library as a public institution in 1923 and naming her director. She retired in 1948 due to ill health, but continued to be a powerful force in the New York art world until her death two years later.
The prose is workmanlike, but Ardizzone (American Studies/Notre Dame) makes an important contribution by bringing Greene’s little-known, culturally significant work to light.Pub Date: June 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05104-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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