A striking volume of remarkable art and informative commentary.
Kogel documents the extensive stained glass of Michigan’s Grosse Pointe Memorial Church in her debut photography book.
Readers in this literate age may forget how important religious art was for centuries of parishioners, as it illustrated for them the stories and symbols of their faith and embodied the concepts they believed in. Stained glass is perhaps the most sublime example—a marriage of color and light that seems to emanate the very notion of grace. Grosse Pointe Memorial Church, a neo-Gothic Presbyterian church in a Detroit suburb, contains an array of translucent stained-glass windows created by the Willet Stained Glass and Decorating Company from the 1920s to the ’60s. Inspired by the storyboard windows of European churches, such as France’s Chartres Cathedral, the Willets led a revival of translucent stained glass, instead of using the opalescent glass that was popular at the time, and created narrative window pieces for many American churches. To move from window to window is to observe the theology and symbology of Christianity, from the Old Testament to the New, through the European Middle Ages and into the North American period. Presbyterian minister Kogel serves as both a photographer and historian, presenting brilliant full-color shots of the glasswork as well as accompanying information on relevant biblical passages and religious traditions. She shares the Willets’ passion for comprehensive narrative and their belief that religious art exists not simply to inspire and to awe, but also to teach. In addition to her own photographs, Kogel provides comparative examples from art history, as well as some of the original Willet drafts. The result is reminiscent of the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages: photography and text in equal parts, both in the service of communicating a religion’s central ideas. The details of each window piece, and the enthusiasm Kogel displays in celebrating them, will deepen readers’ appreciation for the work of all parties involved. Is the Grosse Pointe church the Sainte-Chapelle? No, but this book is a wonderful testament to a great achievement of American stained glass.
A striking volume of remarkable art and informative commentary.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989663717
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Scriptoria Codex, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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