Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this...
Dissecting the mysterious Robert Frank (b. 1924).
In his erudite new biography, Smith (The One: The Life and Music of James Brown, 2012, etc.) explains that Frank is the type to quickly walk out the back door at an event to avoid interviews and send critics and fans running. Though this eccentric character may seem like a perfect New York City creation, he started his life in Zurich in the 1920s. It wasn’t until 1947, after living through the atrocities of the war and the inescapable solitude his Jewish religion instilled, that Frank came to the United States. He arrived at the height of the postwar bloom in creative productions of all types. But for a man like Frank, New York was just a temporary appeaser to his overflowing curiosity. He went off to Europe and South America to explore the range of images he could produce with limited resources. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” he once said. “Trying to tell something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true—except what’s out there, and what’s out there is always different.” Through it all, though, New York remained Frank’s muse. Encountering artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Jonas Mekas, Frank eventually took to the camera to explore the moving image. In parallel, he was also working on his opus, The Americans (1958), which, though viewed today as a foundational work in defining an American identity during the postwar era, was met with significant criticism. Smith compellingly tells the story of one of the most iconic and notoriously aloof artists of the 20th century in a way that is neither dry nor contrived; he helps us to know a seemingly unknowable artist.
Sprinkled with subtle touches of poetic discourse and the author’s deeply felt passion and admiration for Frank’s work, this book is a page-turning emotional delight.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-306-82336-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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