A sparkling, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a brilliant popularizer who brought art to the masses.
The man who wanted to civilize us all.
Kenneth Clark’s (1903-1983) name is synonymous with the BBC’s massively popular 1969 series Civilisation, which he wrote and narrated. It helped him earn his peerage, but he was already a well-known personage at home before the series, as Stourton (Great Houses of London, 2012, etc.) shows in this outstanding, authorized biography. A distant Scottish relative invented the cotton spool, and henceforth the family was wealthy or, as Clark called his parents, the “idle rich.” He grew up an only child in a massive home living a solitary life, but he loved it. Bright, energetic, and hardworking, he went to the best schools. His privilege brought him opportunity, and he took advantage of it. Clark always had a profound love of art, but two of his mentors, Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, convinced him that it was his life’s duty to promulgate “taste,” to bring culture and beauty to the widest possible audience. This passion brought him early success: keepership of fine art at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum at 27 and, at 29, the youngest director of the National Gallery. King George V eventually convinced him to serve as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Still, Clark found time to write. Leonardo da Vinci (1939) is now a classic, but he was “proudest” of The Nude (1956). After the Gallery, Clark taught at Oxford and gave popular and inspiring radio and TV talks, the “lifeblood of [his] reputation.” In 1966, the BBC’s David Attenborough approached Clark with an ambitious “project.” Clark’s wife thought it a “bad idea,” but he plunged into Civilisation with gusto; it was “heaven.” The three-year production was “unprecedented”; a huge success, it brought him “cult status.” After it ran in America on PBS, Clark’s reputation swelled. Stourton proves to be a highly capable guide to this significant 20th-century life.
A sparkling, thoroughly entertaining portrait of a brilliant popularizer who brought art to the masses.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35117-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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