He is the intellectual of the moment, this soft-spoken biographer of great men. Meacham whispers in the president’s ear and appears on TV constantly. - Harper's
Among the unconventional books that he took on when other publishers wouldn't were The Armies of the Night, the first of Norman Mailer's "nonfiction novels"; James Baldwin's Another Country (Baron let Baldwin stay in his country house while he finished it); and Report from Iron Mountain, an antiwar satire which he and editor E.L. Doctorow marketed as a secret,...
With each subsequent decade, Wolf has injected a little more madness into the cesspool of weird that we sometimes call “the discourse.” - The New Republic
Beatty's roles "captured the full spectrum of humanity — from sincerity to villainy, buffoonery to tragedy — and made him one of the most versatile performers of his generation." Beatty: "My great joy is throwing curveballs. Being a star cuts down your effectiveness as an actor, because you become an identifiable part of a product and somewhat predictable. ......
He was one of postwar German's most prominent architects, and had been the country's only living Pritzker Prize winner. "His most revered works resemble jagged concrete mountains, among them the town hall in Bensberg in western Germany that he shaped as a grand fortress and crown of the city. So too the massive pilgrimage church in Neviges, near Düsseldorf,...
"As the inventive design director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and '70s, turned the presentation of art into a gasp-inducing genre of theater" — most famously in the Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition of 1978-79 — "giving the staid institution mass appeal and inspiring widespread changes in the style and spirit of museum exhibitions."...
After he and his brother-in-law, Roman Kroitor, created documentaries for Expo 67 in Montreal that used multiple screens and projectors, they decided to invent a single large-format projector. By the mid-1970s, they had established the technology and made and shown a few highly praised nature documentaries, but it took many years to overcome producer and exhibitor skepticism and get...
The award-winning, beleaguered dissident — famous recently for his dance and opera productions — is also a filmmaker, and he has a new title, Petrov's Flu, in competition at Cannes this year. He wrote the screenplay while under house arrest pending trial on an embezzlement cased widely considered to be trumped-up; he was convicted on that charge last June...
" nearly five decades at the head of the company shaped it into one of the world's most prominent and recognizable publishers of children's literature" — including the Baby-Sitters Club, Captain Underpants, Hunger Games and Harry Potter books — "and an influential education and media company." - Publishers Weekly
Wada wrote and performed music that "was characterized by dense, sustained sounds that could create mind-bending acoustic effects. He borrowed widely from different musical traditions — Indian ragas, Macedonian folk singing and Scottish bagpipes — all while supporting his musical life by working in construction" - which meant that sometimes, tools of the trade (like plumbing pipes) became instruments....
Rivera began by asking her neighbors to be her subjects. "The images she made were majestic four-by-four-foot prints of everyday New Yorkers of all ages. They were time-stamped by their hair styles and clothing as citizens of the 1970s and ’80s, but they were made eternal by their direct gazes, formal poses and the nimbus of light with which Ms. Rivera...
Mayröcker, an Austrian, earned acclaim as a formally inventive poet, but her writing "ranged far more widely, producing an immense body of work that encompassed nearly every literary genre: novels, memoirs, children’s books, drama and radio plays as well as poetry. (Only a handful of her works have been translated into English.)" Perhaps that should change. - The New...
Olivia Rodrigo has figured out something that few have before her. There's" a shift within the Disney sphere, which has apparently evolved enough to allow its stars to curse while still holding down jobs on PG-rated television." - Washington Post
Biasotto was the co-founder of Grupo Krapp with his longtime artistic partner, Luciana Acuña, who wrote, "Luis moved comfortably in the abyss. The emptiness, besides giving him panic, gave him peace of mind. A brave being, by nature. A contemporary hero out of a Marvel comic book. To rehearse with Luis was not being able to stop admiring him,...
