In this deeply researched (though lightly worn) and compelling portrait, Bonanos captures all sides of an artist in spite of...
A fine-grained close-up of the lensman who lit up New York City, both low-life and high-.
If there was ever a caricature of the old-time newspaper photographer, it is Weegee, born Usher—later Americanized to Arthur—Fellig (1899-1968). A stocky Gotham type down to the rumpled suit and ever present 5-cent stogie, he was the man on the scene with the Speed Graphic and the flaming bulb, throwing harsh noirish light on fires, wrecks, and any number of mob hits. Unlike most caricatures, his work has survived. His pictures of dead gangsters, necking teenagers in movie theaters, kids sleeping on fire escapes, a slovenly woman sneering at fashionable operagoers, distraught victims of a tenement fire, or an impossibly crowded Coney Island are indelible images of American life both before and after World War II. In this continually fascinating biography, New York magazine city editor Bonanos (Instant: The Story of Polaroid, 2012, etc.) presents Weegee as a skilled craftsman who learned that you had to “get punch in your pictures” to beat the competition; that meant angle, framing, and environment. A corpse on the sidewalk was just a fact; getting a city mailbox in the foreground—urging “Mail Early for Delivery Before Christmas”—created a story. Voyeurism was both Weegee’s motivation and subject; he found as much drama in a sudden reaction shot—as in his picture of schoolchildren who have just witnessed a murder—as the event itself. The author makes a strong case for Weegee’s continued relevance: “Things that seemed slight when they were made do not always turn out that way in the long run when thinking people who sweat the details are the ones making them. Weegee was one of those people, and he did just that.”
In this deeply researched (though lightly worn) and compelling portrait, Bonanos captures all sides of an artist in spite of himself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-306-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
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
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