A sensitive portrait of a prolific photographer.
Alice’s world.
Yochelson, former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, pays homage to photographer Alice Austen (1866-1952), who, like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, documented a changing America. Born Elizabeth Alice Austen Munn, she grew up at Clear Comfort, her family’s estate on Staten Island, now a public museum and, since 2015, designated an LGBTQ+ landmark. Although her parents separated, Alice grew up in wealth and privilege, indulging in her passion for lawn tennis and, in the mid-1880s, taking up photography, including developing her own prints. Her subjects were family, friends, and suitors; travels near and far; nature and urban scenes. Not interested in selling her work, she often gave framed prints as gifts. Generously illustrated, the biography reveals a change in her perspective in 1891 when she began to use her camera to satirize social rituals and gender politics—posing herself and friends dressed in men’s clothes, for example. In 1893, she traveled to Chicago, the farthest she had ever been from home, to photograph buildings and exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In Manhattan, she documented tradespeople and immigrants she called “street types.” Claiming she was “too good to get married,” Austen found a lifelong companion in Gertrude Tate, whom she met in 1897. They traveled together but did not live together until 1917. Financial troubles dogged their later years: Austen lost all her money in the stock market crash of 1929, and even selling her possessions could not prevent the pair from being eventually evicted from Clear Comfort. Yochelson traces the fraught process by which Austen’s photo collection was rescued by the Staten Island Historical Society, as well as a posthumous controversy over her sexuality.
A sensitive portrait of a prolific photographer.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781531509507
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Empire State Editions/Fordham Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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