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Recent Reviews
Jean Strouse
Rave The Washington Post Beautifully written ... Absorbing ... Strouse complicates the picture with deft accounts of both Sargent’s and the Wertheimer family’s tribulations beyond these questions of identity ... You feel in good hands reading Strouse. She is measured, her research is impeccable, and she tells of interesting lives in interesting times with interesting footnotes to boot.
Peter Schjeldahl
Rave The Washington Post ...filled with terrific examples of Peter doing what he did best. The writing is not sharply different from anything he wrote before the diagnosis. But I think these pieces are gently warmed by new, heart-expanding levels of humility and humor ... Funny, raw, wise and clipped, The Art of Dying is an astonishingly brave piece of writing, hard-packed with tough truths.
Brad Gooch
Rave The Washington Post Does exactly what biographies of the exceptionally famous should do: Gently, graciously, it reels in the myth, restoring the flesh-and-bone reality.
Benjamin Moser
Positive The Washington Post An excellent companion: conversational and congenial, essayistic and elevating ... In a series of digestible pieces, each devoted to an individual artist, Moser combines biographical capsules and historical context with commentary on key works. I’m familiar with all the artists included, but I learned many things I didn’t know and was glad for Moser’s wider, worldly perspective ... The book wanted to be something other than it seemed to be. The dissonance came more from subtle shifts in Moser’s tone than any more-overt waywardness ... Moser’s prose is not flashy. He writes well, with an attractive specificity and receptiveness, about the art itself ... The shifts in Moser’s tone are part of his attempt to draw the general reader in with personal revelations. More and more nonfiction authors are choosing this route. At first (for me, anyway), this strategy was distracting ... But by the book’s end, I found that Moser’s intimate asides had accumulated into something affecting and open-ended ... The Upside-Down World is much more than an elegant guide to Dutch painters. I had the sense Moser didn’t know he wanted it to be more than that while writing these pieces, with the result that at times the book is neither one thing nor another. But I suppose that makes it, commendably, its own kind of thing — and one of several reasons this book will stay with me.
William R. Cross
Positive Washington Post William R. Cross...demonstrates that Homer emerged as a storyteller of enormous power and subtlety in a period — the 1860s — when America was casting around for the right story to tell about itself ... It is fun to be reminded, in Cross’s biography, of all the criticism that came Homer’s way.
John Richardson
Positive The Washington Post The fourth and final volume...is just as rich, just as astounding [as the previous volumes] ... A brilliant detective, Richardson is continually solving \'crimes\' (read \'artworks\') by tracing them back to Picasso’s lovers and his dead sister. It’s mostly convincing, but it starts to feel reductive ... Richardson’s big thesis is that Picasso saw art in terms of magic, especially of exorcism and sacrifice. I think he is basically right. What is hard to swallow is the repetitiveness of Richardson’s idea of Picasso’s particular brand of \'magic,\' which so often sprouts from his feelings about the women in his life ... You expect a biographer to emphasize biographical readings. But it’s a caution that we might apply more generally. What we know about an artist’s life shouldn’t be recruited to secure us against what is wild and unknown in his or her art.
Sally Mann
Positive The Boston Globe Mann has a wordy, headlong style that can feel breathlessly over-the-top one minute and as earthily matter-of-fact as pillow talk the next. Her book is divided into four parts, but it flows like wine-fueled gossip ... Mann is good at puncturing the bubbles she insouciantly blows, whether with passages of disarming openness, cool-headed judgment, or shocking melodrama ... the flair and personal flavor of her writing reminds us that \'issues,\' in the op-ed sense, and art are usually at odds. And in the case of Mann’s best photographs, it’s the art that wins through.
Rachel Cusk
Rave The Washington Post \"With the release of Kudos, these three novels can now be appreciated — and will surely be looked back on — as one of the literary masterpieces of our time ... The stories are the thing. Admittedly, they revolve mostly around marriage, separation and children. But each one reinforces, complicates or undermines the others in a bewitching feat of theme and variation that is rich in emotion, suspense and humor ... Cusk’s deeper theme is the question of how power shapes potential. How do parents shape their children? How do humans shape nature? How does narrative shape truth? In each case, what is gained and what is lost? ... Cusk tells so many stories in part, you feel, because she wants to know what they are for. Are stories a product of the struggle to create meaning, as one character wonders? Or are they more often a mechanism by which to avoid responsibility, to assuage guilt?\
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Rave The Boston Globe Much of the unforgettable first volume of My Struggle revolves around the immediate aftermath of this father’s squalid death. The new volume returns us to this episode. And although the story is told from a different, less pressurized perspective, it is no less gut-wrenching. We see with greater insight this second time how the child’s blameless humiliation is reinforced by the adult son’s guilt at his failure to try to prevent his father’s decline. What is extraordinary about My Struggle is that Knausgaard’s willingness to expose his shame, without ever flinching, is balanced everywhere by his openness to beauty, his belief in transformation, his heartfelt yearning.