A labor of love and a lifetime’s interest expressed in a series of integrated essays that are substantial without being...
A well-rounded exploration of the properties and associations of colors from an engagingly personal vantage.
Finlay, former arts editor for the South China Morning Post, is a British citizen living in Hong Kong, where she is a regular contributor to both local newspapers and London’s The Sunday Times on art and travel, the twin subjects of the current volume, her first. Beginning with the earthy hues first employed by humans in their earliest expressions of art and moving through the spectrum in proper order, Finlay presents what amounts to each color’s story. She draws on many sources in both the hard and soft sciences, art history, and theology. Not least among these are her own experiences and cogent observations while on the trail of each color. Her journeys take her from the Australian outback in search of the ochre the Aborigines once mined and collected in dishes made of bark to the red of cochineal beetles cultivated on Chilean plantations to a conference demonstration in Amsterdam on how to obtain legendary Tyrian purple from a vat of fermenting snails. Though she manages to make even that fascinating, the author’s investigations involve more than the chemistry required to produce the various pigments. She also delves into the cultural connotations of the hue in question, such as when, referring to a remark by newly installed Cardinal Edward Egan, she calls red the color of “both life and death—a beautiful and terrible paradox.” Finlay doesn’t overwrite, though it would be easy, given the plethora of material for consideration, to overwhelm the reader in ancillary discussions or an enumeration of how many disconnected facts the author can recite. In Finlay’s case, her journalistic background prevents her from succumbing to such excesses. The writing is tight, yet her warm, anecdotal approach keeps the reader engaged while she deftly slips in a few bits of information. And while it may be insufficiently obtuse for the professor of optics, the layman, and particularly the artist, are bound to see colors differently.
A labor of love and a lifetime’s interest expressed in a series of integrated essays that are substantial without being weighty.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44430-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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