An enchanting book about the transformative power of art.
A memoir exploring how Johannes Vermeer’s paintings bestow bountiful gifts.
Poet White (Creative Writing/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington; Vermeer in Hell, 2014, etc.) was stunned when he first saw Vermeer’s The Milkmaid during a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Stillness. Not emptiness but stillness,” he thought as he gazed at the figure of the milkmaid. “A great soul balanced there.” When he discovered that only 35 of the artist’s works are on view in the world, he decided to see them all: in The Hague, Washington’s National Gallery, New York’s Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London’s Kenwood House, Royal Collection and National Gallery. In this lyrical memoir, the author recounts his travels in search of Vermeer, set in the context of love, loss and pain: a difficult childhood, alcoholism and recovery, the grueling death of his first wife and, most recently, a wrenching divorce. Along the way, he tells of two unpromising dates with women he met online; his love for his young daughter; and his frustration over the custody fight that will limit his seeing her. Vermeer’s “radiant canvases” serve as an antidote to his enervating sense of loss: “The rapturous inner life of each woman and the infinitesimally detailed and self-contained life of the street are each imagined as an undiscovered heaven on earth.” White’s descriptions are sensuous, precise and evocative. He describes one painting as a “dialogue between Vermeer’s favorite colors [that] pervades the entire atmosphere of the room.” A window “seductively refracts the world rather than revealing it, and in so doing makes it seem new and strange.” The figures communicate with one another in “a circular, closed system of glances.” White praises Vermeer for his sensitivity to “anatomies of intimate, unguarded moments,” a sensitivity that White himself brings to his luminous readings of the paintings.
An enchanting book about the transformative power of art.Pub Date: March 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-89255-437-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Persea Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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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