An obsessive reporter tracks an obsessive artist in a book for die-hard Smith fans.
In a wildly digressive, unconventional biography, documentarian Stephenson (The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, 2009, etc.) reports on 20 years researching the life of W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978).
In 1977, when Smith was evicted from his Manhattan loft, he saw 22 tons of material loaded onto a truck bound for the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Besides photographs, notebooks, and mounds of scrap paper, the shipment included 1,740 reels of tape, recordings of the many artists, musicians, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes who visited Smith, and “absurd oddities such as eight continuous hours of random loft sounds” and “myriad sounds from TV and radio.” Those tapes prodded Stephenson to interview everyone he could track down, men and women now in their 70s and 80s, who had any connection, however peripheral, with Smith. A portrait emerges of a difficult, combative, selfish man, “a bipolar pack rat” addicted to alcohol and assorted drugs. “He drank a fifth of scotch and ate countless amphetamines every day,” Stephenson reports. One psychiatrist deemed Smith’s uncontrollable obsessions to be “very costly, very time consuming and draining for him and others around him.” Famous in the 1940s and ’50s for photographs produced for Life, Smith gave up that connection, left his wife and children destitute, and moved to Manhattan. Suffering from health problems, living in a filthy loft, and struggling financially, he nevertheless always found someone to rescue him, either with money or by managing the mess of his life. Stephenson includes capsule biographies of all his interviewees, along with overly long excerpts from the interviews. Toward the end of his research, in Japan, where Smith took his famous photograph of a mother and her deformed child in Minamata, Stephenson suddenly realized, with some embarrassment, the “absurd degree” to which he “was following Smith’s footsteps.” Readers may draw that conclusion quite early in the narrative.
An obsessive reporter tracks an obsessive artist in a book for die-hard Smith fans.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-23215-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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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