A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography.
Riveting portrait of one of America’s most renowned photographers.
In addition to providing insight into Dorothea Lange’s private life (1895–1965) and professional development, Gordon (History/New York Univ.; The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 1999, etc.) explores the wider context in which she lived and worked. The author’s careful scholarship reveals the connection between Lange’s work and the sociopolitical environment surrounding her, while still portraying her as a normal, flawed human being. Lange is famous for her Depression-era photographs of breadlines and migrant farm workers, yet her career also spanned two World Wars, the rise of fascism and communism, the beginnings of feminism and the civil-rights movement. A successful portrait photographer in San Francisco for more than a decade, Lange left behind her thriving business in the mid-1930s to pursue documentary photography in pursuit of social justice. Because Lange kept no personal papers or diaries prior to 1935, however, Gordon makes several educated guesses about events during this largely undocumented period; the author’s periodic interjections alert readers to the differences between known fact and authorial supposition. Gordon deftly leads readers through the labyrinth of Lange’s life—her apprenticeships with Arnold Genthe and Clarence White, her marriage to painter Maynard Dixon, her work with the Farm Security Administration during the Depression—providing a personal, intimate tour of the photographer’s life and work. Though largely sympathetic, Gordon doesn’t shy away from depicting Lange’s sometimes questionable decisions regarding her personal life.
A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05730-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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