Burke’s graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look.
Illuminating life of the once-renowned model, photographer and traveler who drew few distinctions between life and art.
Born to a well-to-do industrialist, Lee Miller (1909–77) was raped by a family acquaintance at the age of seven; or so, writes Burke (Becoming Modern, 1996), it “must be inferred from the patterns of her later life.” Whatever the unknowable but inferable facts, Miller seems to have regarded herself as damaged goods; it probably did not help matters when her father’s nude photograph of Miller, “December Morn,” was published, becoming, in its time, “as famous, or notorious, as the Mona Lisa.” Later traumas would come, and Miller, a free spirit bound, would process them between what she called her good and bad sides. As a disciple of Alfred Steichen and devotee and lover of Man Ray in Paris, she played the ingénue a little but was more knowing than all that; indeed, she recalled, she was a bit of a fiend. Ray came eventually to regard her as a threat, though it was likely for the ever-deepening quality of her work as a photographer rather than any conflict she herself set in motion. She posed for Picasso, spent pleasant hours with the surrealists, knew Hemingway and Gellhorn, had the kind of life that the present-day bohemian can only aspire to; yet Miller fully came into her own as a combat correspondent (for Vogue) in Europe during WWII, photographing the liberation of Paris and the conquest of Germany. She later recalled, “I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.” Wealthy (she married an English nobleman), well traveled and well connected, Miller became progressively less well known as the years rolled on and her life became less tumultuous, if always more complicated than other people’s lives.
Burke’s graceful biography restores Miller to attention; students of art photography, in particular, will want a look.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40147-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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