A strange, cerebral, and very beautiful journey.
Memoir meets museum catalog in this engagingly meandering, genre-bending collection.
Cole’s debut novel, Open City (2011), is written nearly entirely as the inner monologue of his protagonist, a graduate student walking around New York. In less capable hands, this would be insufferable, but Cole (Known and Strange Things, 2016, etc.) is a master of the quiet, often nonsensical workings of the mind. Here, images take center stage: one per every two pages, with short accompanying text, like the notes at a gallery show (which they are—the images were originally on display in a solo exhibition in Milan). Cole made the pictures over a three-year period as he traveled the globe from Seoul to the Swiss Alps to London to Lagos and back to Brooklyn, where he makes his home. But this is hardly a travelogue; while the pictures are often gorgeous, they are not iconic or grand. Rather, Cole focuses on small things—e.g., the shadows of an outdoor staircase adjacent to the sweeping mountain view at an Alpine summit, tables being set up for an event in Rome, a partially open garage door in Ubud, Indonesia. Tarps and drapery are common themes—they cover musical instruments in Lagos, a brick wall in Berlin, and the windows of countless hotel rooms. War and violence also loom prominently, though the images are uniformly quiet and profoundly peaceful. Accompanying a photo of a nondescript conference room in Seoul, Cole writes about missile negotiations; in Zurich, he remembers “all the places and bodies that had been blown apart by the hundreds of millions of dollars of annual Swiss arms sales.” The author is present in some of the text: waiting for a haircut or moving into a new house, a constant reminder that we are seeing the world through a particular set of eyes. As Siri Hustvedt asks in the preface, “what is seeing? What is inside the looking person and what is outside him? How do we parse what we see?”
A strange, cerebral, and very beautiful journey.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59107-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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