With the assistance of children’s author Tate (Kate Larkin, the Bone Expert, 2008, etc.), blind artist Bramblitt chronicles his childhood and his art without resorting to pathos or sentimentality.
From an early age, the author accepted the two halves of his life, sick and well, and integrated the two. In his memoir, he offers no complaints of the poor medical care he received from age 4 in his Texas hometown. He suffered from undiagnosed congenital kidney disease for three years, then months of Lyme disease, again undiagnosed, and eventually the epilepsy that would lead to total blindness. He was lucky, however, in that he always had friends by his side. They may not have always understood his difficulties, but they supported him. The author’s determination to complete school and teach, in spite of missed classes and incompletes, illustrates the remarkable tenacity with which he has attacked life. Early on, Bramblitt drew from memory—“all my favorite drawings were stored in my brain in all their intricate detail.” Surely this ability is what led him to find and develop haptic visualization, a way of seeing the small parts of an object in order to make them a whole. The sense of touch is a large part of the nature of that perception, and Bramblitt’s work is a good example of an artist who proves Picasso’s comment that a painter “paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” An artist’s story about more than just his talent and his techniques.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8007-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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