Combining thorough research, personal insights and photo galleries of numerous internationally known celebrities, Di Cola...
Debunking the myth that some are just born “photogenic,” author and professional photographer Di Cola investigates the nature of beauty and the empowering concept of the “photo-image.”
With decades of experience photographing stars from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Mariska Hargitay, Di Cola has seen her fair share of good-looking mugs. She explains that the best way to photograph anyone isn’t about a particular angle or set of lights; rather, it’s about revealing the beauty within that person. However, she argues that no one can accurately see themselves unless they invest in understanding and procuring a “photo-image,” which is essentially Di Cola’s version of an unfiltered, honest portrait that is neither refracted nor altered. In daily life, when we look into mirrors, we are seeing a flipped image of ourselves. When we see ordinary photographs, we often feel that they are not accurate representations of us, and so we claim that we are not photogenic. However, with a series of neatly laid out chapters and elegant photo insertions, Di Cola makes the case that everyone is photogenic. The problem is not with the image but rather our perception of that image. By having a solid sense of who we are and what we look like, we allow our full beauty to become evident. Without name-dropping, Di Cola weaves anecdotes from her life as a photographer with her personal and professional insights. She supports her claims for the “photo-image” and our skewed perceptions of ourselves in mirrors with extensive research and physics footnotes. The book acts simultaneously as an endorsement of Di Cola’s services and as a meditative, reflective work. Why do we accede so easily to the perceptions of others? What does it take to give us a solid, genuine sense of self? Perhaps most intriguingly, the book serves to document the sheer power of imagery in our lives. The notion that our sense of self is heavily based on our outward appearances can initially be an overwhelming concept, especially because it’s so ingrained within our society. Di Cola helps us isolate and understand why we have such a difficult time accepting our individual beauty.
Combining thorough research, personal insights and photo galleries of numerous internationally known celebrities, Di Cola has created a thoughtful work on the perception of physical beauty.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494921484
Page Count: 192
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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