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ANSEL ADAMS

Name: ANSEL ADAMS
Author: Mary Street Alinder
ISBN: 0-8050-4116-8

A BIOGRAPHY

by Mary Street Alinder ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 1996

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A well-documented but flawed life of one of America's most famous photographers and environmentalists. Alinder knows her subject well; she worked for several years as Adams's executive assistant (``on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day''), led the team that helped the master assemble his 1985 memoirs, and coedited his volume Letters and Images, 19161984 (not reviewed). Out from under his gaze, Alinder is free to consider Adams more critically than before. She does so only a little, noting, for instance, that for her, an enthusiastic member of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, Adams was ``a monolith: unapproachable because he was unrelatable, an anachronism,'' while the older Imogen Cunningham donned hippie clothes and was part of the scene. In his early years, it develops, Adams was something of a womanizer (no matter whether or not it's germane, no modern biography can escape a look into its subject's sex life), and in later life he acted the curmudgeon, all the while single-mindedly forging a financial empire with his lens. These things Alinder tells us unflinchingly, but she too often falls into starry-eyed, even hyperbolic description, undermining the objectivity of her work: ``Ansel had become world-famous, his name synonymous with both photography and the growing environmental conscience. He had created an awesome string of important images that spoke only of his vision and no one else's.'' There is entirely too much fawning of this sort here, but Alinder covers the main points well, noting especially Adams's signal contributions to the work of the Sierra Club. She notes, as have many others before her, that as a young man Adams trained to be a concert pianist, and his photographs carry an almost musical sense of composition. Alinder's commentary on his style is direct and interesting, and one wishes that there were more of it. Readers familiar with Adams's autobiographical writings will find little new here. (30 b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: April 24, 1996

ISBN: 0-8050-4116-8

Page Count: 576

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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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.