Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. But chatty, catty, and tendentious, too. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)
Richly detailed, highly sympathetic portrait of the Guggenheim who rebelled against her family and then left to them her extraordinary collection of contemporary art.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) could not have wished for a more generous biographer than Dearborn (Mailer, 1999, etc.). Although Dearborn reminds us continually of Guggenheim’s prominent nose (“famously ugly,” “potato-ish,” “bulbous,” “putty-shaped blob”), she credits her for being a principal force in the public’s acceptance of mid-20th-century artists, especially Jackson Pollock, whom Guggenheim signed to an exclusive contract and whose works subsequently skyrocketed in value. The five years Dearborn devoted to researching and writing this text were well spent. She depicts with authority all of Guggenheim’s protégés and friends (Djuna Barnes, thank goodness, had “a lovely nose”); she comments knowledgeably on everything from modern art to early-20th-century celebrity (Emma Goldman and Isadora Duncan, among many others, make appearances); she dutifully chronicles Guggenheim’s failed marriages and leporine love life—a Herculean labor all by itself, since her bedmates were numerous, whether famous (Max Ernst, Samuel Beckett) or faceless but eager. Dearborn also keeps track of Guggenheim’s two children, Sinbad and Pegeen, seeing the latter’s death in 1967 (a drug addict, Pegeen choked on her own vomit) as a loss from which her mother never recovered. We get much family history along the way: Peggy was one of the “poor” Guggenheims (she left an estate of millions rather than hundreds of millions); her father went down on the Titanic; and fellow art collector Solomon was her uncle. The Guggenheim women were not supposed to work, so Peggy was an anomaly among them. Overall, Dearborn too often focuses on exteriors—how people looked, what they wore, where they stayed, how they tanned—and slights the more complicated and ultimately more interesting interiors.
Thoroughly, even lovingly researched. But chatty, catty, and tendentious, too. (16 pp. b&w photographs, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-12806-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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