If the Sontag/feminist fix on photography boosts Milton Meltzer's conscientious investigation of Dorothea Lange's life and work, so much the better: she was an instinctive, articulate photographer (who chose her metier before she clicked a shutter) and a major force in establishing the documentary tradition. As Meltzer lays out the evidence, Lange's penetrating Farm Security Administration pictures of migrants and sharecroppers follow naturally from her penchant for photographing people (not, even outside her commercial studio, "forms in nature"); the "desire to be useful" that, in the Depression, drew her into the streets; and a demanding, dissatisfied nature going back to childhood. "I had that sense very early of what was fine and what was mongrel, what was pure and what was corrupted in things, and in workmanship, and in cool, clean thought about something. I had that. I was aware of that." So she observed in the oral-history interviews that Meltzer astutely uses to project her personality and the character of her work. On the other hand, his log of her professional activities (and running battle with FSA boss Roy Stryker over final control of the image) and personal relations (especially the troubled course of her first marriage) is fuller than anyone but a S. Johnson or H. James warrants; and this lack of selectivity, added to earnest, colorless writing, robs the book of biographical drama. But en route, the San Francisco cultural scene comes alive, we see photography grow as "a tool for investigation," and assignments, exhibits, books mite intelligible, interesting shape. Then, out of the mass of minutiae, Lange will suddenly reappear—to say to visiting photographer Robert Frank, on her deathbed: "I just photographed you."
Pub Date: July 24, 1978
ISBN: 0815606222
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1978
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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