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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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