Ultimately, readers attuned to Weschler's esoteric subject matter and obscure cultural references will no doubt enjoy this...
Weschler's collection of eclectic essays, which reference Eastern European history, Vermeer, Einstein and Ground Zero, among other topics, will alternately enlighten, entertain, confound and confuse.
At least the author, a longtime writer at the New Yorker, isn't above admitting that his perceived “convergences”—oddly diverse photos, paintings or historical happenstances that he feels bound to connect—are often tenuous at best. His own daughter, he points out, would often explain them by saying simply: “Daddy's having another one of his loose-synapsed moments.” We know just what she means when Weschler (Vermeer in Bosnia, 2004) tries to pair a photo of two Ground Zero firemen with Grant Wood's classic painting, American Gothic, or when he earnestly contends that the photographer who shot that famous 1967 photo of Che Guevara's bullet-riddled corpse was somehow thinking of Rembrandt's 1632 painting, The Anatomy Lesson. A photo of the 1986 Challenger explosion leads Weschler to a shot of a nuclear A-bomb test. The visage of Newt Gingrich looks to the author like the spitting image of Slobodan Milosevic, which leads to a strained comparison of their biographies and political DNA. The nascent, struggling democracies of Eastern Europe, on which the author spends much time, recall Oliver Sacks’s 1973 bestseller, Awakenings, which described his treatment of neurologically damaged patients at Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx. While much of this feels like wild overreaching, other Weschler flights of intellectual fancy are curiously entertaining and compelling. An essay on “The Graphics of Solidarity” traces the passionate poster art secretly created by intrepid graphic artists during the early-1980s struggle between Polish shipyard workers and their Soviet puppet government. An eerie full-page ad, featured prominently in many magazines the week before 9/11, shows a Lufthansa jet streaking narrowly between several skyscrapers. The author even makes a persuasive case for the influence of deep-space photos and lunar landscapes on the art work of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko.
Ultimately, readers attuned to Weschler's esoteric subject matter and obscure cultural references will no doubt enjoy this odd collection of delicacies. To others, the exercise may smack suspiciously of dilettantism.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-932416-34-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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