Despite the useful information she has gathered, Van Haaften never brings Abbott fully to life.
Van Haaften (From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography from the New York Public Library, 1982, etc.) seeks to evoke the genius of visionary photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991).
Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott left college at 19 to move to Greenwich Village, where she embarked on an exemplary life in the avant-garde. Originally a sculptor, she turned to photography in Paris in the early 1920s, after becoming an assistant to her friend Man Ray. In 1925, she experienced an epiphany when she discovered the work of photography pioneer Eugène Atget. Atget’s images “sparked in her ‘a sudden flash of recognition‚ the shock of realism unadorned.’ ” Not only did Abbott negotiate the purchase of Atget’s archive—a mixed blessing, it turned out, for a variety of reasons—she found her place behind the lens. Within a decade, she had made the magnificent Night View, New York, an extended-exposure nightscape of midtown Manhattan taken from an aerie in the Empire State Building. “I’m sort of sensitive to cities,” she is quoted as saying, more than once, in this biography. “They have a personality.” If only the same were true of Van Haaften’s writing, which is too often pedestrian, a recitation of facts without enough of the interpretive urgency an artist of Abbott’s caliber deserves. Certainly, the book is comprehensive, and the author populates the narrative with a who’s who of 20th-century cultural heroes, from James Joyce to Jackie Onassis. Still, if Van Haaften dutifully cataloges the particulars of her subject’s experience, she is unable to explore the artist at the level of her soul. The Abbott who emerges here is made up of data points: a lesbian, targeted by the House Un-American Activities Commission for her left-wing politics, scared of heights, disdainful of the trickery of art. What’s missing is excitement and a sense of discovery.
Despite the useful information she has gathered, Van Haaften never brings Abbott fully to life.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-29278-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
