A fascinating multimedia journal, this blend of biography and fiction comes to us from a searching artist/writer whose professional life was spent as designer, marketing consultant and founder of high-technology companies. His unusual book chronicles many of the author’s peak life experiences and relates each story to images from his diverse output of paintings, computer art, marker sketches and whimsical pen doodles. As with his paintings, his stories are sweepingly emotional, nostalgic, capricious, philosophical, and sensuous. Many are strongly opinionated, and more than a few are unsettling. Both words and images coalesce to reflect sensitive, yet colorfully rich visions of what was happening in Radler’s world… from his childhood impressions during the powerless depression years in New York City… through his teens, which were shaded by the anxieties of World War II… to the awakening college years, manhood and finally to the full arc of maturity. The stories begin with the deep emotions that caused him to retain his earliest memories and end with a growing sense of personal mortality. Between those poles, the narratives touch upon a broad spectrum of everyday living: family, city life, rites of passage, adventure, sport, personal philosophy, career and love relationships. Densely written, Radler has a facility for relating complex concepts with few words. The earliest of the eighty stories in this anthology take place in the New York of the thirties as seen through the eyes of a child, but filtered through an adult’s understanding. His mostly two-page tales are never the saccharine revisiting of times past, but rather upbeat, always searching vignettes of a tough, strong-willed, second generation American youth, his friends and family… many of whom had recently come from the poverty and oppression of Eastern Europe to make their way in a new milieu during the depression years.Radler’s reflections are colored by relationships, changing times, places and jobs during the rapid, metamorphosing decades of the thirties, forties, and fifties in New York… and through the nineties in Boston, and the many places he travelled. The last section, Tales of Conscience deals with fact, fiction and experimental authorship, where the artist often attempts to paint with words.
