Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this...
Dissecting the mysterious Robert Frank (b. 1924).
In his erudite new biography, Smith (The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, 2012, etc.) explains that Frank is the type to quickly walk out the back door at an event to avoid interviews and send critics and fans running. Though this eccentric character may seem like a perfect New York City creation, he started his life in Zurich in the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1947, after living through the atrocities of the war and the inescapable solitude his Jewish religion instilled, that Frank came to the United States. He arrived at the height of the postwar bloom in creative productions of all types. But for a man like Frank, New York was just a temporary appeaser to his overflowing curiosity. He went off to Europe and South America to explore the range of images he could produce with limited resources. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” he once said. “Trying to tell something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true—except what’s out there, and what’s out there is always different.” Through it all, though, New York remained Frank’s muse. Encountering artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jonas Mekas, Frank eventually took to the camera to explore the moving image. In parallel, he was also working on his opus, The Americans (1958), which, though viewed today as a foundational work in defining an American identity during the postwar era, was met with significant criticism. Smith compellingly tells the story of one of the most iconic and notoriously aloof artists of the 20th century in a way that is neither dry nor contrived; he helps us to know a seemingly unknowable artist.
Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this book is a page-turning emotional delight.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82336-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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