A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.
A weighty, prodigiously researched biography of John James Audubon.
Logan makes his debut with an expansive account of the naturalist’s summer expedition to Labrador in 1833, an adventure that he believes hasn’t been fully covered by earlier biographers. Still, readers who haven’t previously studied this 19th-century artist/ornithologist aren’t dropped into the tale midstream. The author devotes more than a third of the narrative to Audubon’s early years, from his birth to an unwed mother in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, through his years of business failures in the American South, until his successful, herculean accomplishment: the publication of the first volumes of The Birds of America. He personally sold his costly prints by subscription, which were delivered as each volume was completed. In 1833, he still needed some final specimens in order to produce drawings and engravings to complete the four-volume masterpiece. At the time, he was facing production problems in England, subscribers who complained that they weren’t receiving prints in a timely fashion, and the effects of a stroke. Logan believes that the Labrador expedition afforded Audubon the opportunity to reclaim his physical stamina and rebuild his self-confidence. It also marked the dawn of Audubon’s awareness of man’s impact on the environment; he wrote: “When the fish are destroyed as according to present appearances they soon will be and the birds too, what will then be in Labrador. The destruction…is too wicked.” Logan uses copious primary and secondary source materials, including meticulously documented newspaper articles, personal letters, and journal entries written by Audubon and his legion of acquaintances, as well as hundreds of pages of endnotes—some referential, others featuring heavy annotations. He draws a vivid image of a charismatic personality who was, by turns, ebullient, melancholy, obsessed, and inquisitive. Overall, the book is scholarly in tone yet generally accessible. The text becomes a bit wearying at times, loaded as it is with biographical tidbits on just about everyone Audubon met. But the extensive descriptions of the naturalist’s slog through Labrador, the ordeals of ordinary travel, and the nature of 19th-century social networking illuminate the era. The book also includes maps as well as illustrations (not seen).
A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972282-1-2
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Ashbryn Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
At-times inspirational memoir about a journalist’s battle with a grave disease she had to face while also dealing with her...
With the assistance of Chambers (co-author; Yes, Chef, 2012, etc.), broadcaster Roberts (From the Heart: Eight Rules to Live By, 2008) chronicles her struggles with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare condition that affects blood and bone marrow.
The author is a well-known newscaster, formerly on SportsCenter and now one of the anchors of Good Morning America. In 2007, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she successfully fought with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Five years later, after returning from her news assignment covering the 2012 Academy Awards, she learned that chemotherapy had resulted in her developing MDS, which led to an acute form of leukemia. Without a bone marrow transplant, her projected life expectancy was two years. While Roberts searched for a compatible donor and prepared for the transplant, her aging mother’s health also began to gravely deteriorate. Roberts faced her misfortune with an athlete’s mentality, showing strength against both her disease and the loss of her mother. This is reflected in her narration, which rarely veers toward melodrama or self-pity. Even in the chapters describing the transplantion process and its immediate aftermath, which make for the most intimate parts of the book, Roberts maintains her positivity. However, despite the author’s best efforts to communicate the challenges of her experience and inspire empathy, readers are constantly reminded of her celebrity status and, as a result, are always kept at arm's length. The sections involving Roberts’ family partly counter this problem, since it is in these scenes that she becomes any daughter, any sister, any lover, struggling with a life-threatening disease. “[I]f there’s one thing that spending a year fighting for your life against a rare and insidious…disease will teach you,” she writes, “it’s that time is not to be wasted.”
At-times inspirational memoir about a journalist’s battle with a grave disease she had to face while also dealing with her mother’s passing.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-7845-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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