An obsessive reporter tracks an obsessive artist in a book for die-hard Smith fans.
In a wildly digressive, unconventional biography, documentarian Stephenson (The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, 2009, etc.) reports on 20 years researching the life of W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978).
In 1977, when Smith was evicted from his Manhattan loft, he saw 22 tons of material loaded onto a truck bound for the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Besides photographs, notebooks, and mounds of scrap paper, the shipment included 1,740 reels of tape, recordings of the many artists, musicians, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes who visited Smith, and “absurd oddities such as eight continuous hours of random loft sounds” and “myriad sounds from TV and radio.” Those tapes prodded Stephenson to interview everyone he could track down, men and women now in their 70s and 80s, who had any connection, however peripheral, with Smith. A portrait emerges of a difficult, combative, selfish man, “a bipolar pack rat” addicted to alcohol and assorted drugs. “He drank a fifth of scotch and ate countless amphetamines every day,” Stephenson reports. One psychiatrist deemed Smith’s uncontrollable obsessions to be “very costly, very time consuming and draining for him and others around him.” Famous in the 1940s and ’50s for photographs produced for Life, Smith gave up that connection, left his wife and children destitute, and moved to Manhattan. Suffering from health problems, living in a filthy loft, and struggling financially, he nevertheless always found someone to rescue him, either with money or by managing the mess of his life. Stephenson includes capsule biographies of all his interviewees, along with overly long excerpts from the interviews. Toward the end of his research, in Japan, where Smith took his famous photograph of a mother and her deformed child in Minamata, Stephenson suddenly realized, with some embarrassment, the “absurd degree” to which he “was following Smith’s footsteps.” Readers may draw that conclusion quite early in the narrative.
An obsessive reporter tracks an obsessive artist in a book for die-hard Smith fans.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-23215-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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