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THE GREAT NADAR

Name: THE GREAT NADAR
Author: Adam Begley
ISBN: 978-1-101-90260-8

THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA

by Adam Begley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017

Begley capably brings to life the lost Parisian world where Nadar held court. His outsized personality dominates this...

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A lively portrait of a photography pioneer who altered the cultural landscape of 19th-century France.

If readers in America know anything about Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (1820-1910), better known as Nadar, it's that he took some penetrating, iconic pictures of French celebrities—Victor Hugo, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, and George Sand among them—and perhaps also that he broke new ground in aerial photography by taking his camera and tripod aloft in a hot air balloon. As Begley (Updike, 2014, etc.) reveals in this entertaining biography, these facts hardly suggest the full range of Nadar's involvement in the haut monde of his day. He was also a cultural force, a one-man entertainment industry who spawned a host of imitators. In his early days, he was a young rebel. Along with close friends like the poet Charles Baudelaire and the tormented (and ultimately suicidal) writer Gérard de Nerval, he was a bohemian: young men of exhausted means who lived on the margins of society, borrowing from each other and running up debts. Nadar started his professional life as a writer of hopelessly corny moral tales. Never one to stay in the same place for long, he then became a widely known caricaturist who created a pen-and-ink pantheon of French society under the Second Republic of Louis-Napoleon. Barely did he make a name for himself before giving it up for photography, where he found his calling. He became a master of the new medium, adept at manipulating light and shade. He gained wealthy clients who liked seeing themselves immortalized in their finest clothes; he also helped create what we now know as celebrity culture. He also became rich enough to pursue new and sometimes insanely risky ideas involving flight as well as to fight endless legal battles with the brother who kept stealing his name.

Begley capably brings to life the lost Parisian world where Nadar held court. His outsized personality dominates this enjoyable and amply illustrated volume.

Pub Date: July 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-101-90260-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.