A documentary filmmaker examines the history of conveying truth on screen.
Drawing on his own career and extensive research (including viewing every film he discusses), Wilkman (Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles, 2016, etc.), whose series Moguls and Movie Stars was nominated for three Emmys, offers an illuminating, encyclopedic history of nonfiction film, from Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 images of a galloping horse to the virtual reality of the 21st century. While Westerns, comedies, mysteries, and romances dominated the entertainment industry in its early days, in 1908, in order to meet audiences’ demand for “glimpses of the real world,” the French film company founded by Charles Pathé and his brothers began distributing newsreels: short films recording events such as a daredevil’s fall from the Eiffel Tower and a suffragette march in Washington, D.C. In addition to showing current events, including images of military activities during wars, nonfiction movies became a popular means of education. Henry Ford, diving into movie production, offered films on topics such as pottery making, newspaper production, and, not surprisingly, “Ford’s way of doing business.” Wilkman creates vivid profiles of significant documentarians: photographer Edward S. Curtis, who filmed Native peoples of British Columbia; the daring Osa and Martin Johnson, who filmed expeditions in Africa and the South Pacific; and Robert Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North, a lyrical celebration of Inuit culture, became an unlikely box office success. During World War II, the Army enlisted acclaimed director Frank Capra to produce documentaries “to show Americans what they’re fighting for and why.” TV ensured new audiences for revelations about public issues, society, and culture, on such programs as See It Now, CBS Reports, Frontline, Ken Burns’ histories, and a groundbreaking PBS series, An American Family, that filmed daily life in the Santa Barbara home of the Louds. The author also underscores the importance of documentary film “at a time when the foundations of evidential inquiry are under attack and virtual reality promises to change perceptions of what is accepted as real.”
A capacious celebration of film’s potential to show us the world.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-103-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Possibly inspired by the letters Cleary has received as a children's author, this begins with second-grader Leigh Botts' misspelled fan letter to Mr. Henshaw, whose fictitious book itself derives from the old take-off title Forty Ways W. Amuse a Dog. Soon Leigh is in sixth grade and bombarding his still-favorite author with a list of questions to be answered and returned by "next Friday," the day his author report is due. Leigh is disgruntled when Mr. Henshaw's answer comes late, and accompanied by a set of questions for Leigh to answer. He threatens not to, but as "Mom keeps nagging me about your dumb old questions" he finally gets the job done—and through his answers Mr. Henshaw and readers learn that Leigh considers himself "the mediumest boy in school," that his parents have split up, and that he dreams of his truck-driver dad driving him to school "hauling a forty-foot reefer, which would make his outfit add up to eighteen wheels altogether. . . . I guess I wouldn't seem so medium then." Soon Mr. Henshaw recommends keeping a diary (at least partly to get Leigh off his own back) and so the real letters to Mr. Henshaw taper off, with "pretend," unmailed letters (the diary) taking over. . . until Leigh can write "I don't have to pretend to write to Mr. Henshaw anymore. I have learned to say what I think on a piece of paper." Meanwhile Mr. Henshaw offers writing tips, and Leigh, struggling with a story for a school contest, concludes "I think you're right. Maybe I am not ready to write a story." Instead he writes a "true story" about a truck haul with his father in Leigh's real past, and this wins praise from "a real live author" Leigh meets through the school program. Mr. Henshaw has also advised that "a character in a story should solve a problem or change in some way," a standard juvenile-fiction dictum which Cleary herself applies modestly by having Leigh solve his disappearing lunch problem with a burglar-alarmed lunch box—and, more seriously, come to recognize and accept that his father can't be counted on. All of this, in Leigh's simple words, is capably and unobtrusively structured as well as valid and realistic. From the writing tips to the divorced-kid blues, however, it tends to substitute prevailing wisdom for the little jolts of recognition that made the Ramona books so rewarding.
Pub Date: Aug. 22, 1983
ISBN: 143511096X
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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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. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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