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WALKER EVANS

A BIOGRAPHY

Serviceable and cautiously polite, this first full-length biography of photography giant Evans is nonetheless a long overdue contribution to scholarship. Rathbone, a photography curator and historian, met Evans when she was an aspiring photographer seeking his guidance, and she continues to treat him with reverence in this carefully researched life study. Evans (19031975), of Presbyterian St. Louis heritage, was son of a middle-class adman. As a teenager, he came east to prep at Loomis and Andover, dallied in college at Williams for awhile, then traveled to Paris. While riches eluded Evans throughout his life, he comported himself as an aristocrat and viewed the world from that privileged position. Inspired by European Modernists, he took to documentary photography early in the century, when its art potential had yet to be tapped. Working odd magazine assignments, then at length for the government's Resettlement Administration, Evans took his painstakingly elegant portraits of plain people and vernacular architectural studies in New York City, Havana, and the rural south of the Depression era, captured most memorably in his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. (Rathbone is most arresting in her descriptions of Agee and Evans trying to ingratiate themselves with the Alabama sharecropper community they were sent to record.) Aloof, remote, and driven by an inner personal esthetic, Evans is seen experimenting in romantic and sexual dalliances before moving through two troubled marriages. By the 1950s and '60s, younger protÇgÇs Robert Frank and Diane Arbus sought Evans out, recognizing the singularity of his documentary vision. While Rathbone's study competently traces Evans's life course, it only tiptoes around questions of character and motivation. Rathbone tells why Evans's vision of America was archetypal and powerfully original, but his persona remains an elusive presence behind the work. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: June 8, 1995

ISBN: 0-395-59072-8

Page Count: 338

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995

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THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...

A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.

Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010

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JUST KIDS

Riveting and exquisitely crafted.

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  • National Book Critics Circle Finalist

Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.

Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.

Riveting and exquisitely crafted.

Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009

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