A memoir in the form of an answer to a love letter delivered 20 years late, by the second wife of James Agee. ``Wanting so badly to answer'' that letter, mislaid in the interim, from the long-dead Agee, Neuman has finally eased her grief by writing the candid story of her life. As much an account of love and friendship betrayed as a memoir of 1930's intellectual bohemia and of postwar Germany, the narrative also describes a journey to painful self-knowledge and acts as a rueful confession of a tendency never to look back but to look optimistically ``always straight ahead''—with not always happy results. The daughter of mismatched parents—a cultivated mother and a barely literate but successful father—Neuman, an accomplished musician, was attracted early on to intellectual households where music and literature were important. Her first boyfriend, Frisk Saunders, was the son of an eminent professor who, with his wife, befriended the young woman, despite reservations about her Jewish background. It was in Saunders's home that Neuman first met Agee, who soon married Frisk's sister—a union quickly ended by Agee's affair with Neuman. The author traveled to the American South with Agee, visiting the families that he was to write about in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and she came to know Agee's friends; but when Agee was unfaithful, she fled with their son, baby Joel, to Mexico, where she met and later married German refugee Bodo Uhse. After WW II, the couple moved to East Germany, where Uhse, a longtime Communist and respected writer, enjoyed special privileges. His infidelity and an increasing unease with the regime, however, led Neuman to return to the US, where she finally learned how to live without depending on a husband's status. A life of great range and interest, told with disarming frankness by a woman of remarkable zest and experience. More than a literary footnote. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8071-1792-7
Page Count: 165
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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