A useful introduction to the man who established photographs as both works of art and important historical documents.
The editor of the American Scholar tracks the career of America’s pioneering photographer.
“Brady and the Cooper Institute made me president.” Harmless flattery, perhaps, but Abraham Lincoln’s remark testified to the influence of his 1860 speech in New York City and to the widely distributed photograph taken that day by Mathew Brady (circa 1822–1896). With studios in New York and Washington, D.C., and already famous as a portraitist, Brady’s galleries grew to contain a who’s who of 19th-century distinction: writers like Poe, Cooper, Twain and Whitman; presidents from Quincy Adams to McKinley; statesmen like Clay, Calhoun and Webster; military leaders like John C. Fremont and Winfield Scott; and distinguished visitors like the Prince of Wales. Brady lured the well-heeled and, increasingly, the middle class through his doors to be similarly immortalized by the new technology that he and his assistants mastered and advanced. When the Civil War arrived, Brady and his team of photographers went into the field, and their unprecedented, comprehensive images of camp life, battlegrounds and soldiers documented the national catastrophe for all time. Wilson (The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence in the Old West, 2006, etc.) concedes from the beginning that little is known about Brady’s personal life—not even the place or date of his birth—but the author compensates with a thorough tracking and assessment of the professional career, describing for general readers the origins and swift growth of the photographic science, the team of variously skilled workers required to make the earliest images, and the controversies over photo attribution that persist. Wilson paints Brady as the consummate ringmaster, with a Barnum-like talent for selling himself and his product and for gathering and distributing images that made the phrase “photo by Brady” seemingly ubiquitous.
A useful introduction to the man who established photographs as both works of art and important historical documents.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-203-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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