An unbiased, worthwhile recollection of the marvelous invention of photography.
Watson, the curator of the Fox Talbot Museum, and historian Rappaport (A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert, and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy, 2013, etc.) develop the intricate history of photography.
The appropriate hardware was, of course, known from antiquity in the form of the camera obscura. What wasn’t accomplished until the 19th century was the fixing of the evanescent image projected in the back of that simple box. “Such is human inventiveness,” write the authors, “that it was not long in the new…century before some of those who looked at the images in the camera obscura began wondering whether they could push the boundaries of its use.” Many devoted amateurs worked assiduously on the challenge to capture the light with chemical solutions on paper or on metal. Some worked alone; others shared their results. Among the researchers were Francois Arago, Tom Wedgwood and Alphonse Hubert. In Paris, the inventor Nicéphore Niépce produced negative images but never thought to print positives from them. Then, in 1839, Niépce’s former partner, the scenic artist and showman Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) displayed to an amazed world portraits and pictures of street scenes made by nature itself. The Daguerreotype was a sensation. By then, across the Channel, English polymath Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) had devised the calotype process and a way to utilize a negative to produce multiple images on paper; he had not announced it with fanfare. First conceived of as a tool for artists and scientists, by the second half of the century, photography became a popular craze, especially in the United States. For Daguerre and Talbot, many honors, and patent disputes, followed. Then came tintypes, cartes de visite and stereopticons. Photojournalism pursued war and politics. Improvements in commercial printing and color processes promoted photography. Today, snapshots of Martian landscapes are commonplace.
An unbiased, worthwhile recollection of the marvelous invention of photography.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00970-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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