Compelling photos whose color, composition, and subjects invite lingering attention.
Text and photographs document the author’s 2010 trip to Nepal, undertaken in hopes of escape and discovery.
For Desind (Lost in Language, 2015, etc.), 2010 was difficult. Donald, his partner of 17 years, died suddenly from an undiagnosed heart condition. The relationship had been crumbling after years of diminished intimacy, and Desind was looking for a new attachment, but Donald’s death was a shock. Desind’s parents both faced serious health problems, too. Nepal represented at first an escape into the exotic as well as a chance for Desind to experiment with his new camera equipment and get over his shyness in asking people’s permission to take their photos. Some of Desind’s concerns in Nepal, like whether the new man in his life texted him back, loom very small in the post-earthquake context of this book; that said, his extraordinary photographs command attention. Each photograph is one to spend time with. They benefit from Desind’s decision to “tell a story of color and stolen moments surrounded by chaos” in a place where a town might look like “a wedding cake placed none too gently on a pile of trash.” This choice allows Desind to show off his talented eye for composition, color, and the telling juxtaposition. In one photo, a boy with thick, unruly curls and huge dark eyes stares calmly to the side; his T-shirt reads, “NATURE.” In another, a tiny store selling Pepsi is visible in the background behind the corner of a worn building traversed by colorful prayer flags. In the foreground runs the blurry shadow of a baboon. One breathtaking photo depicts an elaborately carved wooden doorway in a stone building. A sadhu’s dark-skinned legs furred with white hair rest on the stone sill, his body invisible in the interior darkness; all is brown, black, and gray but for a glimpse of worn textile with pops of ochre and plum. The effect is both dignified and homely. Moral issues are inherent to photography, and Desind deals with the issues thoughtfully, for example, showing children hard at work but also their bright-eyed exuberance.
Compelling photos whose color, composition, and subjects invite lingering attention.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-47898-1
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Pride Enterprises
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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