She strolled Venice’s Piazza San Marco clad only in a fur cloak, escorted by pet cheetahs on jeweled leashes; she adorned herself with snakes, live and stuffed, and accessorized an evening costume with chicken blood. She was a Belle Epoque eccentric, big time. Luisa Casati was also extraordinarily wealthy in her own right, heir to a Milanese cotton fortune and wife of an Italian noble. Her marriage began to disintegrate after just a few years, when she began an affair—and a lifelong friendship—with Italian poet and writer Gabriele D‘Annunzio. Here she began to re-create herself, evolving from a rather shy, conformist young woman to the flamboyant pale-faced redhead, her remarkable green eyes rimmed by kohl, who would be the subject of more than 130 portraits, many by famous artists. She decorated a villa in Rome, refurbished a Venetian palazzo (now the Peggy Guggenheim museum), and threw extravagant parties and costume balls, mingling socialites and her newfound artist friends. As illustrator—graphic designer Ryersson and film critic Yaccarino describe it, her behavior grew increasingly bizarre—life-size wax replicas of herself and others were seated as guests at dinner parties—but she continued to intrigue serious artists like Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, and Augustus John, who was her lover briefly and a friend until she died. Eventually, her self-indulgent life style left her $25 million in debt; in 1932 her personal possessions were auctioned off. She resettled in England, sinking into poverty so acute that it was a choice between food for herself or for her dogs. (The dogs won.) Her life was the inspiration for a play starring Vivien Leigh and an Ingrid Bergman film. Casati died in 1957, her tombstone inscribed: “Age can not wither nor custom stale her infinite variety.” In essence, a predictably superficial superstar bio—Cher at the turn of the century, as it were. (42 b&w, 8 color illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-9670527-2-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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