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
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.
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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