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A review by lakecake
The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts by Nicholas Delbanco
3.0
I'm reviewing a copy received for free from Goodreads Giveaways.
This is a really interesting concept, and piggybacks off of the author's last work Lastingness (which I haven't read, but is interesting as well)--that book was about artists who have lasting careers, and this one was about genus that dies young. Besides Gershwin, the artists picked are kind of obscure--I couldn't name the guy who wrote The Red Badge of Courage off the top of my head before reading this, and in about 3 weeks I won't be able to do it again--but I think that actually added to the interest level. Because there's no "research" one can do into the author's theory--that is, that some forms of genius just can't last past a certain age--this was mostly good to me as a biographical study of the artists in question. I don't know how one would do research on this subject, but some kind of scientific backup for the theory would have been nice, speaking as a nerd. Also, the chapter on the author himself felt very self-indulgent and unnecessary, and I was REALLY distracted by all the semi-colons he decided to use in that one.
All in all, thought-provoking, but it could have used some back-up on the theory.
This is a really interesting concept, and piggybacks off of the author's last work Lastingness (which I haven't read, but is interesting as well)--that book was about artists who have lasting careers, and this one was about genus that dies young. Besides Gershwin, the artists picked are kind of obscure--I couldn't name the guy who wrote The Red Badge of Courage off the top of my head before reading this, and in about 3 weeks I won't be able to do it again--but I think that actually added to the interest level. Because there's no "research" one can do into the author's theory--that is, that some forms of genius just can't last past a certain age--this was mostly good to me as a biographical study of the artists in question. I don't know how one would do research on this subject, but some kind of scientific backup for the theory would have been nice, speaking as a nerd. Also, the chapter on the author himself felt very self-indulgent and unnecessary, and I was REALLY distracted by all the semi-colons he decided to use in that one.
All in all, thought-provoking, but it could have used some back-up on the theory.