As he lay dying of AIDS in February 1990, Keith Haring asked for a pad and pen and haltingly outlined a child on all fours surrounded by lines emanating like rays of sunshine. This was the Radiant Baby, long his most famous image, and it was appropriate that he should reach for it at the end because it was the perfect symbol of his life and work.
Haring, who died at 31, had a certain childlike radiance himself. Once past teenage Jesus-freak and drug phases in Kutztown, Pa., he applied himself to his art with boundless energy and enthusiasm. In 1980 he started drawing with chalk in the New York City subways, and soon his colorful cartoony paintings and his witty metal sculptures were everywhere. He often created all the works for a show a few days before it opened, even painting every surface of the gallery itself. "When he's finished a piece, there's nothing that you could think of that you'd want to change," artist Roy Lichtenstein told Gruen. "Even if he did something all at once...there just isn't a false move."
In biography, authorized often means sanitized, and there may be nasty things about Haring you won't learn here. But Gruen, an art critic and author (The Private World of Leonard Bernstein), vividly re-creates Haring's feverish and fecund life and times through interviews with the voluble artist, his devoted family and his colorful friends and associates. Their words form the entire text. By the end of the amply illustrated book, you forgive Haring's self-promotion and fascination with celebrities as expressions of his expansive, embracing nature; his thick lines and sensuous shapes fill your mind as they once did city walls and gallery ceilings, cascading over every surface like a kind of pop, visual Bach. (Prentice Hall, $30)
by Joe McGinniss
by Jerry Bledsoe
The story behind these books began in 1988 when Lieth Von Stein, a prosperous North Carolina businessman, was bludgeoned and stabbed to death as he slept in his bed. The attack also left his wife, Bonnie, grievously wounded.
Police eventually focused their investigation on Christopher Pritchard, 19, Bonnie's son and Lieth's stepson. The crime, they concluded, grew out of drug-and-aleohol abuse and an obsession with the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons by Chris and two of his college friends. (Pritchard was given life in prison, Neal Henderson 40 years. James Upchurch, who wielded the murder weapons, is appealing his death sentence.)
If nothing else, the situation proved perfect for writers McGinniss and Bledsoe. Both specialize in documenting the turmoil and tortures of family murders, though McGinniss is the higher profiled of the two, thanks to his best-sellers Fatal Vision and Blind Faith. Both writers were drawn to the story for its soap-opera elements—a devoted mother, a troubled son, new-wealth, determined cops, a small town and a dead stepfather.
Cruel Doubt (Simon & Schuster, $25), is the better book. McGinniss attempts to delve deeper into the motives behind the madness. Bledsoe, less analytical, focuses on the greed and obsessions of Chris Pritchard and his accomplice friends. While not nearly as well-written as Cruel Doubt, Blood Carries (Dutton, $22.95) does leave a clearer impression of the sadness and depravity of the affair.
In the end, however, both books prove unsatisfactory because the case is devoid of any vindication or moral lesson. Blood Carries and Cruel Doubt detail the darkest form of true crime story, one in which all the participants are victims."
by Elizabeth Swados
The daughter of a suicide and the sister of a schizophrenic, Elizabeth Swados seems a perfect candidate for mental-health problems. That the successful playwright-composer (Runaways) is able to write such a clear-eyed book about her family is laudable. More amazing is that The Four of Us manages to be both a moving tribute and a searingly honest examination of mental illness and its ramifications on the other members of a household.
Raised in an upper-middle-class, intellectual Jewish family in Buffalo, Swados, 40, was something of a prodigy: While a Bennington student, she composed her first professional works for La MaMa, an experimental theater workshop in New York City. But underneath the accomplished child of privilege was a terrified young woman who both embraced and resented what she perceived to be her mandate: to be successful.
Her brother, Lincoln—also brilliant, but erratic even from childhood—had disappointed Swados's father, a successful lawyer who could not bring himself to see that the boy was mentally ill. Her mother—perhaps feeling guilty about Lincoln's disease—alternately ignored Elizabeth and harped on her daughter's looks, her boyfriends, her "wild" behavior. As the son became sicker, the mother withdrew until she finally committed suicide when Swados was 23. Lincoln died a street person at 46, in 1989.
This would be a thoroughly gruesome story—and there is much about it that is horrific—were it not for Swados's way of including loving anecdotes. While Lincoln, as a child, played terrible mind games with his sister (he created a terrifying, fictional "Aunt Matilda" to teach Elizabeth manners), he also showered his sister with praise. " 'You are a princess,' Lincoln often said to me. 'You are my Princess Elizabeth sister.' "
Swados's frankness about her life is also impressive; she admits to having had love affairs with both men and women, and to consuming large quantities of drugs.
Never whiny or self-aggrandizing, Swados succeeds in evoking both the culture of her cosmopolitan and politically liberal family and the era in which she grew up. (About a hippie boyfriend in the '60s: "I believed our active sex life was transforming my writing, thinking, musical taste, and physical posture.... Sometimes we audited each other's classes just to watch the other learn.")
This book is more than a personal catharsis; it should be required reading for anybody who comes from a family, complicated or—well, what other kind is there? (Farrar Straus Giroux, $19.95)
- Contributors:
- Eric Levin,
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Sara Nelson.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
