Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered.
Perceptive biographies of a quartet of Gilded Age women.
During his long and fruitful career as a portraitist, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) counted among his opulent subjects four women embedded in the glittering, passionate, and sometimes-tawdry landscape of 19th-century high society. Drawing on much archival material, Lucey (Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age, 2006, etc.) returns to themes of her last book, revealing love, madness, greed, and occasional triumph at a time when even wealth did not necessarily guarantee women independence. Sargent himself stands at the periphery of Lucey’s engrossing stories, although he was handsome, dashing, and astonishingly productive. Portraiture supported him and his family, but toward the end of his career, he disdained the genre; he was tired, he said, of flattering his patrons. Lucey chose her subjects well: four women who responded in unexpected ways to the challenges that they faced. Elsie Palmer, daughter of a rich Colorado businessman, was destined to be the caretaker for her family until, at the age of 35, she courageously decided to marry—the only way, writes the author, that she could flee her father’s “smothering demands.” Lucia Fairchild was the sister of the beautiful Sally, subject of one of Sargent’s most enigmatic portraits. Raised in “a cocoon of privilege, money, and influence,” the Fairchild girls and their brothers saw their wealth vanish. Lucia managed through a combination of “talent and raw courage”: encouraged by Sargent, she became an artist, working tirelessly to support her spendthrift husband and their children. The lovely heiress Elizabeth Chanler suffered from a hip infection that left her strapped to a portable bed for two years during adolescence. She fell in love, scandalously, with a friend’s husband, the writer John Jay Chapman, and they married after his wife died suddenly. Isabella Stewart Gardner grew up a rebellious tomboy and never lost her willfulness and determination. She became the most prominent art collector of her time, leaving her collection—including Sargent’s work—in her own museum.
Colorful, animated portraits sympathetically rendered.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-07903-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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