A rich, compelling look at a thriving yet increasingly threatened natural resource and those who depend on it.
A writer and photographer offers a thoughtful exploration of the vital role played by salmon in Alaskan communities.
Gulick (Salmon in the Trees, 2010), whose work has appeared in Audubon and National Wildlife, follows up her preceding book with this well-reported and gorgeously illustrated volume about the intimate, complex relationship between salmon and the Alaskan people. Salmon is a gift, the author explains, and those who receive it all share a “deep connection to these remarkable fish,” though they may sometimes disagree on the best way to use and protect the prize they’ve been given. Alaska is one of the few places that still has a flourishing population of wild salmon, Gulick asserts before interviewing people whose very existence depends on the continued health of salmon runs. Some are transplants who run the sport-fishing businesses that attract tourists to America’s last frontier; others are commercial fishermen; and several are Alaska Natives who keep centuries-old traditions alive when they catch and preserve the flavorful fish. The author provides an up-close look at “the salmon way” as she ventures out on a fishing boat, travels by seaplane into the wilderness, encounters bears, and sits down for many meals as she gets to know “the salmon people of Alaska.” The result is a vivid portrait of a place that will likely be foreign to many readers; 18% of the population still harvests fish, game, and plants in order to survive. Those who embrace a subsistence way of life (either by choice or necessity) might seem poor to outsiders, but they “consider themselves the richest people in the world,” with access to the vast variety of nature’s bounty, as Gulick explains. Her conversations with those who depend on salmon deftly show how the fish are a vital link in the state’s environmental and economic systems but also how they bind families and communities together. Few who read this illuminating book or see the author’s awe-inspiring color photographs will fail to come away with a sense that this is a way of life well worth preserving.
A rich, compelling look at a thriving yet increasingly threatened natural resource and those who depend on it.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68051-238-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Braided River
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Hello, Dal°! Or how Europe's Surrealists moved in on the New York art scene, and how the avant-garde became assimilated into popular culture. Tashjian (Comparative Culture/Univ. of California, Irvine; Skyscraper Primitives, not reviewed) presents a rich account of how Surrealism, initially a rarefied metaphysical European art movement, became an archetype of 20th-century American aesthetics. He begins by discussing French poet AndrÇ Breton, whose 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism addressed how the visual arts could access unconscious experience. Influenced by Carl Jung's notion of the collective unconscious, Breton and others—including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy—gathered in Paris. As fascism spread and WW II approached, many of the Surrealists fled to New York. There they were supported by forward-thinking patrons like gallery owners Julien Levy and Peggy Guggenheim and collector Katherine B. Dreier and her SociÇtÇ Anonyme, Inc. Activist American social-realist painters—James Guy, Walter Quirt, and O. Louis Guglielmi in particular—also were quick to adopt Surrealist visual tropes. By WW II, the exiled community of European avant-gardists was firmly entrenched in New York. Tashjian details the philosophical impact that they had on young American artists, particularly Joseph Cornell and Jackson Pollock. But it was the Spanish-born Salvador Dal°, with his grandstanding personality and huckster ways, who fixed the public eye on Surrealism. He courted the press, made windows for Bonwit Teller, and even designed a ``Dream of Venus'' pavilion for New York's 1939 World's Fair. Soon the movement was media fodder. Tashjian tells how it was parodied in New Yorker cartoons, how it influenced high fashion, and how it was ultimately co-opted into Hollywood films and advertising. Revealing a wide curiosity, Tashjian goes beyond art history, freely zigging and zagging between high and low culture in this lively probe of issues of anxiety and influence. (86 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-500-23687-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
``One should learn from nature and paint the image in one's mind.'' No, this is not the credo of a Western impressionist but of Zhang Zao, an eighth-century Chinese painter. Anyone familiar with the ethereal nature of the landscape painting, the delicacy of bird, branch, and flower in pen-and-ink drawings, will recognize the influence of Zhang Zao's notion in Chinese painting. As Barnhart, an art historian at Yale, and his collaborators (several of them on the staff of the Palace Museum in Beijing) show, this artistic tradition has its origins in the Asian equivalent of the Lascaux cave paintings, dating back to the Neolithic era. The history of this exceptional art, its practitioners and their technique, and the metaphorical significance attributed to the artworks are all discussed in illuminating detail, ending with the contemporary neoclassical works that draw on tradition but add a modern flavor. The text is accompanied by 300 fine color and 25 black-and-white reproductions of extraordinary works, many never before available in the West. Consider this the Janson's of Chinese painting.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07013-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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