Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bill, and Other True-Life Tales - Softcover

Weschler, Lawrence

4.04

45 ratings by Goodreads

9780140132786: Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bill, and Other True-Life Tales

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140132783 ISBN 13: 9780140132786

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1990

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Lawrence Weschler has created six remarkable stories of people who suddenly seem to catch fire, becoming utterly obsessed and ending up somewhere entirely different from where they thought they were headed.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Bizarre twists of fate and the mysterious workings of grace link these profiles of six people who unexpectedly changed the direction of their lives. We meet Ahumal Ramachander, an intense, polyglot Indian who, on his first trip to the U.S., discovered an obscure abstract-expressionist painter named Harold Shapinsky. Ramachander decided that his true calling, his karma, was to champion Shapinsky's work. His story reveals the ruthlessness of a slick art world. Other dreamers who followed their instincts include Knud Jensen, Danish cheese exporter turned art-museum director; Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, an award-winning comic-strip history of the Holocaust; and Nicolas Slonimsky, energetic Russian conductor who found a new vocation in his mid-60s as a musical lexicographer. We also meet eccentric artist James Boggs, who often is arrested for spending his near-perfect renditions of $100 bills, and Lenny Durso, an almost bankrupt owner of a bookstore. Weschler is a staff writer for the New Yorker, where most of these sensitive portraits first appeared.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

These six portraits by a staff writer for The New Yorker have all the charm, elegance, and wry humor associated with that magazine. Each short biography tells the improbable tale of a person sidetracked by fate into the unexpected: an overlooked abstract painter catapulted into fame in his old age; a Danish cheese executive transformed into a flamboyant museum curator; an all-but-forgotten avant-garde conductor from the 1920s now the world's foremost musical lexicographer; an artist who draws money and spends it at face value with collectors only to be tried for counterfeitingthese are just the principals in the cast of characters. A thoroughly enjoyable, amusing book suitable for most public libraries.Michael Edmonds, State Historical Soc. of Wisconsin, Madison
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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