Adventurous memories of a talented photojournalist that abound with wonderful surprises.
Souders offers a debut account of his photographic travails in Canada’s Hudson Bay area.
The author, a Seattle-based photographer who’s done work for National Geographic and Life, tells of when he went in search of polar bears in the remote reaches of northeastern Canada. This book, based on his notes from four boat trips between 2012 and 2015, offers a pleasurable excursion into the arctic wilds, interspersed with excellent, colorful images that give a good sense of the landscape, such as one of melting sea ice and a distant forest fire. Before embarking on an account of his journeys, however, Souders describes his own background, including his youth in rural Pennsylvania, his time in journalism school at the University of Maryland, and his experiences as a photojournalist in Haiti and South Africa. After Souders decided that he wanted to pursue nature photography, he studied “the masters of my craft—everyone from Ansel Adams to Art Wolfe, Galen Rowell, and Frans Lanting—and I did everything I could to make my photographs look like theirs.” In Seattle, he purchased a C-Dory boat—nicknamed “C-Sick”—for his excursions throughout the Hudson Bay. The rest of the book relates in sumptuous detail how he searched for sea ice and polar bears from Marble Island to Wager Bay and Melville Peninsula. While exploring the Nunavut and Manitoba Territories, he chatted with Inuit hunters and fishermen, made satellite calls to his wife back home, sipped bourbon alone on his boat, and, of course, took photos. Souders writes with a journalist’s eye for detail: “I glassed all the different shapes and contours of the melting sea ice looking for any sign of polar bears.” It’s also a pleasure to read his descriptions of the landscape, animals (“Mom and cute cubs on a summer stroll across the rocky tundra. I watched her progress through the long lens, the steady click, click, click of the shutter matching her steps until she filled the frame”), and locals he met along the way.
Adventurous memories of a talented photojournalist that abound with wonderful surprises.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68051-104-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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