Generously illustrated, Mann’s memoir is testimony to photography’s power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.
A journey of self-discovery begins in family archives.
An invitation to deliver the prestigious Massey lectures at Harvard inspired photographer Mann (Sally Mann: Immediate Family, 2014, etc.) to embark on a search for her past, beginning with boxes stored in her family’s attic. She hoped to find “a payload of southern gothic”: juicy details of “deceit and scandal,” including suicides, fortunes made and lost, and even a murder. Her sources did not disappoint her, and she effectively weaves a “tapestry of fact, memory, and family legend” in this candid and engrossing memoir. An incorrigible child, Mann loved to cavort naked on the Virginia farm where she grew up. Her mother, exasperated, turned over her care to Gee-Gee, the loving African-American woman who served as the family’s housekeeper, cook, and nanny. Mann’s rebellion continued throughout high school, where she discovered a passion for writing and photography that channeled her energies. “I existed in a welter of creativity,” she recalls, “—sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer.” Married at 18, she continued her creative life at Bennington College and made photography her vocation. For the next several decades, she “virtually lived in the darkroom,” dealing with “some end-of-tether frustrations” in printing her work. She was “blindsided,” she writes, when she was accused of child abuse and exploitation after the publication of Immediate Family (1992), which included nude photographs of her children. Besides revealing portraits of her parents and Gee-Gee, Mann chronicles the sordid murder-suicide of her husband’s parents; a deranged letter-writer later accused Mann and her husband of the crime. Although committed to photography as an art, Mann is troubled by the medium’s “treacheries”—i.e., its power to displace real memories.
Generously illustrated, Mann’s memoir is testimony to photography’s power to evoke tender, lucent portraits of the past.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-24776-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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