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THROUGH ANOTHER LENS

MY YEARS WITH EDWARD WESTON

A memoir of the famed photographer at his peak, by his model, wife, and confidante. Wilson was herself nationally famous 60 years ago, thanks to the series of nude photographs Weston shot of her in places like Yosemite and Death Valley. The daughter of Harry Leon Wilson, the author of Ruggles of Red Gap and other contemporary bestsellers, Wilson was 27 years Weston’s junior. But, like him, she was a passionate reader, filmgoer, and follower of Franklin Roosevelt, and from these shared interests they formed a marriage that lasted for many years, despite Weston’s philandering. Wilson never falls into hero worship, although she clearly admires her husband for his character and for the world to which he introduced her, featuring everything from Brancusi sculptures and jazz sessions to parties with the likes of Ansel Adams, Robinson Jeffers, Merle Armitage, and other mainstays of the Carmel bohemian community. She admits that Weston, like many a creative type, had his difficult qualities, but she defends him stoutly against biographers who take the Weston found in his journals and daybooks to be the man himself, a figure —dogmatic, fierce, uncompromising, licentious, obsessed by death, and so on.— He was to some degree all these, she writes, yet, she goes on to observe, —the self is too cumbersome, various, and confusing to be successfully transcribed, so you settle for a stand-in who can represent you by bearing a number of your salient traits.— Wilson, who was with Weston throughout the years of his most accomplished photographic work, does much to flesh out this stand-in. She also provides, with a light but sure touch, an intellectual history of Weston’s time and place, California in the 1930s and ’40s, a portrait that students of the Golden State’s artists and writers will find exceptionally interesting. A sympathetic and altogether enjoyable portrait of a great artist in his prime. (photos, not seen)

Pub Date: May 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-86547-521-0

Page Count: 416

Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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