Truly an eye-opening invitation.
Paired to a personal selection of favorite photos from a broad variety of artists, Meyerowitz distils a lifetime’s thought about getting, and appreciating, the shot.
Sandwiched between large eye-shaped windows cut into the front and rear covers, the veteran photographer’s observations are addressed as much to serious picture takers as to picture viewers. Along with noting, for instance, that a Cartier-Bresson image of a man in midair, unsuccessfully trying to leap a puddle, exemplifies the essential principle that “Timing Is Everything,” he points to a funny detail—a circus poster in the background with an acrobat in a similar posture—that could easily go unnoticed. Similarly, among comments about capturing light and color, using reflections and sequences, experimenting with angles and points of view, he offers broadening insights (“Although the photograph is of laundry, it isn’t about laundry”) as well as reasons to take second and even third looks at how seemingly disparate elements fit together. The diversity of both subjects and photographers is impressive; even when he chooses works by well-known artists such as Walker Evans or Gordon Parks, they are likely to be familiar only to longtime students of the medium. Overdesigned text pages (and an uncompelling choice to illustrate “trompe l’oeil”) won’t dim the pleasure of lingering over these big, crisply reproduced pictures…all of which are reminders “that the most banal objects, the most commonplace afternoons, contain unexpected mystery and wonder.”
Truly an eye-opening invitation. (Picture book. 11-15)Pub Date: June 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59711-315-1
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Aperture
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Ghostwritten for a fictional 13-year-old character on the ABC Family network show Secret Life of the American Teenager, this September-to-August journal recaps the first season and part of the second—from 15-year-old sister Amy’s revelation that she’s pregnant through her parents’ divorce and the news that her mother herself is expecting. In the snarky tone she generally takes onscreen, narrator Ashley relates events from her own point of view and elaborates on them in long, wordy entries replete with adolescent self-assurance. Of a run-in with the school principal, for instance: “I think the real reason I got into trouble was because I expressed my individuality. It tends to scare authority figures when someone my age does that.” This “enhanced” e-book includes 10 brief video clips embedded in the general vicinity of their relevant passages. There is also a closing page of links to expedite the posting of reader ratings and reviews. Aside from a pair of footnotes pushed to a screen at the end, far away from their original contexts, the translation to digital format works seamlessly for reading/viewing in either single-page/portrait or double-page/landscape orientation. There’s enough standard-issue teen and domestic drama here to keep fans of such fare reading, but devotees of the show may be disappointed at the lack of significant new content, either in the narrative itself or in the e-book’s media features. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-9596-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish.
The creator of such picture books as Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance (1999) and Three Nasty Gnarlies (2003) dishes up a first novel seasoned with the same delightfully twisted, ghoulish sensibility.
Immediately upon arriving in Awkward Falls, a small Manitoba town known for its canned sauerkraut and its Asylum for the Dangerously Insane (“both,” notes the narrator, “to be avoided at all costs, as one was likely to cause gas, and the other, death.”), 12-year-old Josephine meets agemate Thaddeus Hibble. Thaddeus is a scientific genius who has lived alone since infancy on an all–junk-food diet supplied by a robot butler and paid for by re-animating the dead pets of local matrons. Together the two are plunged into personal danger and worse at the clutching hands of hunchbacked lunatic cannibal Fetid Stenchley, former lab assistant and Asylum escapee. With aid from a supporting cast of colorful locals, a half-rotted corpse brought back to partial life and a ravening herd of chimerical monsters created in a secret biotechnology lab, Graves crafts a quick-moving plot composed of macabre twists. These are made all the ickier for being presented in significant part from Stenchley’s point of view. Wordless opening and closing sequences, plus a handful of interior illustrations, both fill in background detail and intensify the overall macabre atmosphere. The central characters receive just, if, under the circumstances, not necessarily final deserts.
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish. (finished illustrations not seen) (Melodrama. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8118-7814-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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