Despite the useful information she has gathered, Van Haaften never brings Abbott fully to life.
Van Haaften (From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography from the New York Public Library, 1982, etc.) seeks to evoke the genius of visionary photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991).
Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott left college at 19 to move to Greenwich Village, where she embarked on an exemplary life in the avant-garde. Originally a sculptor, she turned to photography in Paris in the early 1920s, after becoming an assistant to her friend Man Ray. In 1925, she experienced an epiphany when she discovered the work of photography pioneer Eugène Atget. Atget’s images “sparked in her ‘a sudden flash of recognition‚ the shock of realism unadorned.’ ” Not only did Abbott negotiate the purchase of Atget’s archive—a mixed blessing, it turned out, for a variety of reasons—she found her place behind the lens. Within a decade, she had made the magnificent Night View, New York, an extended-exposure nightscape of midtown Manhattan taken from an aerie in the Empire State Building. “I’m sort of sensitive to cities,” she is quoted as saying, more than once, in this biography. “They have a personality.” If only the same were true of Van Haaften’s writing, which is too often pedestrian, a recitation of facts without enough of the interpretive urgency an artist of Abbott’s caliber deserves. Certainly, the book is comprehensive, and the author populates the narrative with a who’s who of 20th-century cultural heroes, from James Joyce to Jackie Onassis. Still, if Van Haaften dutifully cataloges the particulars of her subject’s experience, she is unable to explore the artist at the level of her soul. The Abbott who emerges here is made up of data points: a lesbian, targeted by the House Un-American Activities Commission for her left-wing politics, scared of heights, disdainful of the trickery of art. What’s missing is excitement and a sense of discovery.
Despite the useful information she has gathered, Van Haaften never brings Abbott fully to life.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-29278-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
