A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography.
Riveting portrait of one of America’s most renowned photographers.
In addition to providing insight into Dorothea Lange’s private life (1895–1965) and professional development, Gordon (History/New York Univ.; The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 1999, etc.) explores the wider context in which she lived and worked. The author’s careful scholarship reveals the connection between Lange’s work and the sociopolitical environment surrounding her, while still portraying her as a normal, flawed human being. Lange is famous for her Depression-era photographs of breadlines and migrant farm workers, yet her career also spanned two World Wars, the rise of fascism and communism, the beginnings of feminism and the civil-rights movement. A successful portrait photographer in San Francisco for more than a decade, Lange left behind her thriving business in the mid-1930s to pursue documentary photography in pursuit of social justice. Because Lange kept no personal papers or diaries prior to 1935, however, Gordon makes several educated guesses about events during this largely undocumented period; the author’s periodic interjections alert readers to the differences between known fact and authorial supposition. Gordon deftly leads readers through the labyrinth of Lange’s life—her apprenticeships with Arnold Genthe and Clarence White, her marriage to painter Maynard Dixon, her work with the Farm Security Administration during the Depression—providing a personal, intimate tour of the photographer’s life and work. Though largely sympathetic, Gordon doesn’t shy away from depicting Lange’s sometimes questionable decisions regarding her personal life.
A rigorously constructed, entertaining biography.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-05730-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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