Burke’s graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look.
Illuminating life of the once-renowned model, photographer and traveler who drew few distinctions between life and art.
Born to a well-to-do industrialist, Lee Miller (1909–77) was raped by a family acquaintance at the age of seven; or so, writes Burke (Becoming Modern, 1996), it “must be inferred from the patterns of her later life.” Whatever the unknowable but inferable facts, Miller seems to have regarded herself as damaged goods; it probably did not help matters when her father’s nude photograph of Miller, “December Morn,” was published, becoming, in its time, “as famous, or notorious, as the Mona Lisa.” Later traumas would come, and Miller, a free spirit bound, would process them between what she called her good and bad sides. As a disciple of Alfred Steichen and devotee and lover of Man Ray in Paris, she played the ingénue a little but was more knowing than all that; indeed, she recalled, she was a bit of a fiend. Ray came eventually to regard her as a threat, though it was likely for the ever-deepening quality of her work as a photographer rather than any conflict she herself set in motion. She posed for Picasso, spent pleasant hours with the surrealists, knew Hemingway and Gellhorn, had the kind of life that the present-day bohemian can only aspire to; yet Miller fully came into her own as a combat correspondent (for Vogue) in Europe during WWII, photographing the liberation of Paris and the conquest of Germany. She later recalled, “I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.” Wealthy (she married an English nobleman), well traveled and well connected, Miller became progressively less well known as the years rolled on and her life became less tumultuous, if always more complicated than other people’s lives.
Burke’s graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40147-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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