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Recent Reviews
David Shields
Mixed New York Times Book Review An amusing compilation of hundreds of short, random-seeming questions that come unaccompanied by answers ... Shields maintains a playful and absurdist tone that pokes fun at the conventional Q. and A. ... The questions in Shields’s book have their own distinct personality. Granted, some of them are nominally informational ... At first it seems as if Shields intends his book to be an indictment of the media ... But what if Shields made up the questions he supposedly culled from past interviews? As you read on, you become more convinced of that possibility ... Shields wants to blur artistic boundaries, a noble postmodernist pursuit, but The Very Last Interview succeeds only in blurring his point. Despite the broad cultural exploration promised in the jacket copy, Shields has produced a narrow, nihilistic investigation into the vicissitudes of his own career. Preoccupied by his professional disappointments, he is inattentive to the sublime consolations of art. I have a question for him. Next time, can you please think bigger?
Alex Danchev
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"As a whole, the book is accessible, factually reliable and, at 439 pages, free of the inflated heft of so many recent biographies ... Magritte declined to talk about his mother’s death, even privately, and dismissed psychology as a pseudoscience. Danchev does not say much about the subject ... Even so, it seems fair to say that his mother’s death and the years of depression that preceded it surely bear a connection to the all-around sense of apprehension pervading his work. Danchev is on firmer ground in describing Magritte’s career.
Ingrid Rowland & Noah Charley
Mixed The New York Times Book Review [Giorgio Vasari’s] life was as remarkable as that of any of those Renaissance masters whose adventures he chronicled. Although the vignettes he related were notoriously untrustworthy, you can choose to be generous and contemplate the thousands of facts and critical opinions he managed to get right. Ingrid Rowland, a prominent scholar of Renaissance art and history, and her fellow writer and historian Noah Charney, wear their erudition lightly in their gracefully written biography … Astoundingly, as Rowland and Charney make clear, no one before Vasari had written a series of artist biographies. There were lives of poets, lives of philosophers; there were rollicking lives of depraved rulers of the Roman Empire. But those subjects belonged to the upper classes … The biography as a whole settles for breeziness and even glibness when close analysis is needed.
Ross King
Positive The New York Times Book Review ...an engaging and authoritative portrait of the aged artist and his travails ... The Monet who emerges from King’s pages is a sympathetic and vivid character — less the wizened patriarch of French Impressionism than a crotchety septuagenarian afflicted with toothaches ... The friendship between Monet and Clemenceau amounts to its own fascinating story and resembles an odd-couple comedy ... The book is short on analysis and fails to definitively explain the role played by Monet’s illness in the development of his late style. Nonetheless, Mad Enchantment offers a moving portrait of the artist as an old man.
Julian Barnes
Mixed The New York Times Book Review One is sorry that Barnes has declined to give the 86-year-old Oldenburg — and American art generally — the benefit of his normally searching gaze. Instead of Keeping an Eye Open to cite his sly title, he might try keeping both eyes open.