Long overdue and exceedingly well done
This excellent book provides the first comprehensive study of Jack London’s work as a photographer. London, of course, is most famous as one of America’s greatest authors, the writer of such celebrated works as The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Sea-Wolf. Despite being an incredibly prolific author and a world wide celebrity, London also managed to take over 12,000 photographs during his all-too-brief lifetime. While that number may not seem outrageous by today’s standards, a century ago when cameras were bulky and complex and photography was a difficult and labor intensive craft, that’s quite an achievement. For all intents and purposes, London was a professional photojournalist, and this is the first book to treat him as such.
Though London is most famous for his stories of the Klondike Gold Rush, unfortunately he did not carry a camera when he ventured up to Alaska and the Yukon. The photos in this book are divided into six chapters, each a photojournalistic journey. The first chapter contains pictures he took in the slums of the East End of London in 1903, while researching and writing The People of the Abyss. The second set of photos covers his period as a war correspondent in Korea in 1904, covering the Russo-Japanese War. Next there is a chapter on London’s photos of the destruction caused by the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. This is followed by a long chapter devoted to photos taken while London and his wife Charmian attempted to sail around the world in their yacht, a journey immortalized in the book The Cruise of the Snark. This group of photos, taken in 1907 and 1908, depicts their travels in Hawaii, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Solomon Islands. In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. London sailed from Baltimore to Seattle, around Cape Horn, on a four-masted sailing ship, a voyage which provided the inspiration for his novel The Mutiny of the Elsinore. The photos from this trip are presented in chapter five. The book finishes off with a chapter of photos from 1914, when London worked as a war correspondent covering the Mexican Revolution in Veracruz and Tampico.
Readers of London’s works may have seen a few of these photos before, but usually in small and murky reproductions. Never before has his photographic work been reproduced so big and so beautifully. To a contemporary audience, London’s photos, though black and white, are reminiscent of the sort of photojournalism one finds today in National Geographic magazine, yet for their time they were quite ground breaking. London depicts people of other cultures, such as the islanders of the South Pacific or the revolutionaries of Mexico, with a candor and dignity that was unusual for his day. He treats his subjects not as representatives of their race or objects for some scientific study, but as individual human beings living their lives. The text is a worthy accompaniment to these remarkable photos. The pictures are ably supported by explanatory captions and excerpts from London’s writings. For those well-versed in London’s life and work, there’s still plenty new to learn here. Much of the text concentrates on London’s place in the history of photography and photojournalism, a subject which has never before been examined to such a thorough extent.
Jack London, Photographer is a beautiful coffee table book and an enlightening scholarly examination of this artist’s life and work. More than just a supplement to his writings, it is a work of art in and of itself and well deserves a spot on the shelf alongside the hallowed works of the classic London canon.
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Standing on the shoulders of giants
Flood! is a wordless novel composed of scratchboard illustrations by artist Eric Drooker. It continues the rich but little-known tradition of pictorial literature best exemplified by the works of expressionistic woodcut artists Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. That Drooker has thoroughly studied the work of these great masters of the past is quite obvious. At times the homage is a little too faithful, as there are scenes here that seem as if they were lifted directly out of Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage or Madman’s Drum. Drooker makes the art form his own, however, by filtering these historic influences through the visual language of the underground comics movement that originated in the 1960s. The resulting concoction is a truly beautiful and profound work of graphic storytelling.
Though subtitled “A Novel in Pictures,” it’s unclear whether the three parts of Flood! are intended to be chapters in a novel or rather three self-contained short stories. Each features a lone male protagonist who wanders through a labyrinthine metropolis. As in the works of Ward and Masereel, this representative man struggles to survive in his oppressive urban environment, along the way encountering the hazards of poverty, unemployment, violence, incarceration, love, and lots and lots of rain. Despite the hardships, the city is not without its moments of sublime beauty. The book starts out rather gritty and realistic, then becomes more and more fanciful and whimsical—incorporating dream sequences and hallucinations—all along ambitiously broadening its scope until its subject matter encompasses no less than the end of the world itself. Both the artwork and the narrative are loaded with hidden treasures, revealing new discoveries with each rereading. Drooker is to be commended for resurrecting this lost art form and shaping it with his own unique vision. Those who appreciate skillfully crafted graphic art, either vintage or contemporary, will find much to enjoy in this latter-day classic.
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Fractured fairy tale
Within Zola’s body of work, this odd little book sticks out like a sore thumb. A stylistic departure from Zola’s characteristic Naturalism, it reads almost like a fairy tale. Angelique, the illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon, is adopted by a married couple in the town of Beaumont. Angelique learns the family trade, embroidering tapestries and vestments for the town’s cathedral. She grows up in the shadow of this thirteenth-century cathedral, leading the cloistered life of an artisan. Reading becomes her favorite recreation, and romantic tales of saints and ancient royalty fascinate her. Within the centuries-old walls of the family home and the adjacent garden, Angelique leads a peaceful, content existence which imbues her with innocence and naiveté. Her passage from childhood to womanhood is irrelevant to her and goes largely unnoticed, until a young man enters her life and inspires in her dreams of a future life beyond the garden walls.
Angelique is such a likeable character that the reader really roots for her to succeed in achieving those dreams. One almost forgets how totally unbelievable the plot is. The book is a pleasant enough read, but utterly inconsequential. Upon finishing the book, one asks what’s the point? It adds little to the Rougon-Macquart series as a whole. Zola’s knack for descriptive thoroughness hits and misses in this book. His vivid depictions of the artisans’ home, their lifestyle, their trade and craft captivate the reader. His long lists of saints and kings, on the other hand, inspire fatigue. Anyone who is reading the entire Rougon-Macquart series obviously should and will read this book. Casual fans of Zola’s writing would probably do better to skip it.
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An epic saga of Man and Earth
In spite of the fact that I did not grow up on a farm, or perhaps because of it, I’ve always been a sucker for a good peasant epic. As soon as I heard of Growth of the Soil I wanted to read it. Once I dove into chapter one it quickly earned a spot among my all-time favorites.
Growth of the Soil was written in 1917 by Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, due largely to the magnificence of this great work. The novel opens with a solitary figure, heavily laden with supplies, trudging across the wilds of Norway. A day’s walk from the nearest village, he selects a spot to call his home, and begins cutting timber and turning the soil. He erects a sod house which is visited once every few months by the occasional nomadic herder, and he makes it known to those who come by that he is looking for a woman to help him with the chores around the place. One day that woman comes. The very night of her arrival they begin living together as man and wife. They are simple folk, not particularly smart and far from beautiful, but they work hard, relentlessly, like two beasts of burden, to carve a living from the earth. Together Isak and Inger build a home, a farm, and a family in this deserted wasteland.
Eventually a community forms around them, and their isolation diminishes. Their estate, dubbed Sellanraa, increases in size, wealth, and conveniences. Yet this is no rural Utopia. Evil influences invade their bucolic idyll. When residents of this rural outpost venture into the villages and cities, they return with unhealthy ideas that foster a disillusionment with their agrarian life and lead them toward sin. An undercurrent of stoic and pantheistic morality pervades the book. The more the characters surrender themselves to the will of nature, the greater their contentment and reward. The more they stray from the natural order of life on the land, the greater their disappointment and ruin.
Growth of the Soil bears some resemblance to another well-known work of literature, The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Both novels chronicle the lives of farming families. Hamsun’s work, however, is darker in tone, more psychologically complex, and, despite being written 15 years earlier, a touch more modernistic in style. Hamsun presents a naturalistic slice of rural life in Norway, just as Buck tells a realistic story of farmers in China, yet both books transcend the spatial and temporal limits of their settings to make universal statements on the themes of family, work, and the relationship of man to his environment. Both books use deceptively simple language to tell their tales, exhibiting an elegant economy of words evocative of the stark and simple lives of the characters being depicted. In Hamsun’s case, I’m not sure if I have him to thank for this beautiful prose, or the English translator W. W. Worster, but every sentence of this work is as pithily poetic as a carefully crafted haiku.
Reading Growth of the Soil is a powerful and moving experience. From the opening lines of the first page one immediately becomes intimately engaged in the lives of these vividly drawn characters. When the book comes to an end it’s difficult to say goodbye. Unlike The Good Earth, unfortunately, Growth of the Soil has no sequel, so enjoy every page while you can.
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Excellent, effective instruction
If you're reading this, I’ll assume you’ve already worked your way through DeFrancis’s Beginning Chinese Reader, or are in the process of doing so. If not, see my review for that book. The Intermediate volumes in the series are structured a little bit differently than the Beginning. Instead of ten characters per chapter there are sixteen, and there are a lot more combinations, probably over 100 in each chapter. Because of the increase in volume of information, it’s more difficult to get through than the Beginning volumes. You will find the first few lessons to be rather hard, but eventually you just get used to it. Every sixth lesson is still a review lesson. There are 30 lessons in all, so both volumes of the Intermediate Chinese Reader combined give you a total of 400 characters.
As you learn more characters, the scope of subjects you are able to cover broadens dramatically. Whereas in the Beginning Reader you were reading about England and America, in the Intermediate Reader you are reading about the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and the United Nations General Assembly. In Beginning you learned the word for democracy, here you’re reading paragraphs discussing the differences between liberalism, conservatism, and imperialism.
The last time my Taiwanese in-laws came to the States, they were very impressed when I started writing out paragraphs in traditional Chinese characters. They were shocked when I told them that I was learning on my own without the help of an instructor. What’s more, they even complimented me on my grammar.
The DeFrancis system works. Obviously the more time you put into it the more you will learn and the better you will read and write. I am looking forward to working through the Advanced volume, but I already feel that from the first four volumes I have acquired a foundation of knowledge sufficient to enable me to study other texts and dictionaries and expand my Chinese vocabulary through independent study.
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Much more than just “To Build a Fire”
Lost Face is a collection of seven short stories by Jack London, all of which take place in Alaska or the Yukon Territory around the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. It is most notable for being the collection which contains “To Build a Fire,” the classic story of a man trudging along the Yukon Trail, alone but for his dog, who finds himself struggling for survival against the 75-below-zero cold. It is London’s most famous and widely read piece of writing, about as perfect as a short story can be, and sure to be read in junior high school English classes for centuries to come.
In addition to this renowned masterpiece, Lost Face is loaded with unexpected gems. I had never heard of the other six stories in this collection, and I was greatly surprised at how good they are. By the time Lost Face was published in 1910, London had already published five collections of Klondike tales, ranging from the excellent (The Faith of Men) to the OK (Love of Life). In the latter book, London showed signs of exhausting the subject matter and running out of ideas, but here in Lost Face he comes up with seven very solid, original, exciting tales.
The title story, “Lost Face,” recalls the odyssey of a Polish freedom fighter who is imprisoned by the Russians, then escapes from the mines of Siberia and ends up in Alaska. He finds himself faced with torture and death at the hands of a Native American tribe, and desperately tries to come up with a way out of his predicament. “That Spot” is a comical tale in which the narrator recalls a dog he owned during his prospecting days in the Yukon; a magnificent, powerful, keenly intelligent beast who absolutely refused to perform the slightest bit of useful labor. In “Flush of Gold,” two travelers on the sled dog trail stop at a cabin on Surprise Lake, where dwells a beautiful, mysterious woman who pines for a former lover. As one of the men relates the woman’s history to his companion, the reader discovers the bizarre love story that darkens her past. “The Wit of Porportuk” tells of an Alaskan Indian chief, famous for his generosity and extravagance, who runs up big debts to a miserly money lender. When the time comes to collect the debt, the lender, Porportuk, sees it as an opportunity to claim the chief’s beautiful daughter El-Soo for his mate. The girl, however, being very clever and well educated, comes up with a scheme to avoid becoming the greedy old man’s property. Neither party’s plans prove entirely successful, however, and just when you think you know where the story’s going, it turns in a shocking and unexpected direction.
Comparing the stories of Lost Face to London’s Klondike tales of a decade earlier, one really gets a sense of how much he progressed as a writer. These seven tales are rendered in smooth and beautiful prose, skillfully plotted, and remarkably vivid in their depiction of time and place. Reading Lost Face transports you to the bygone world of the exotic North. Through London’s eyes, it’s a wild and unpredictable place where the powerful beauty of nature is ever present, and invigorating adventure is commonplace.
Stories in this collection
Lost Face
Trust
To Build a Fire
That Spot
Flush of Gold
The Passing of Marcus O’Brien
The Wit of Porportuk
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Largely absent from his own life story
Jose Clemente Orozco was one of the leaders of the Mexican mural movement and an important painter of the early 20th century. Unfortunately, you’re not going to learn much about him from this book. Though he lived through the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution and contributed to the dynamic transformation of Mexican art, Orozco seems remarkably blasé about it all. For the most part he reports political and cultural events with the detachment of a disinterested bystander, and says little about himself in the process.
Although Orozco writes with a degree of wry, cynical wit that’s not without its charms, the reader finds himself wishing for a little more sincerity. When moments of enthusiasm do appear, they are few and far between. One gets some inkling of the exuberance felt by the young Mexican artists as they determined to break with European traditions and form a uniquely Mexican expression. However, after enumerating the founding objectives of the revolutionary Syndicate of Painters and Sculptors, Orozco then goes on to explain how they failed to achieve almost every one of those objectives. Later in New York, Orozco becomes enamored with Dynamic Symmetry, the mathematical analysis of proportions in classical art conceived by Jay Hambidge. Orozco devotes several pages to Dynamic Symmetry, but his description of the theory is difficult to decipher. Perhaps this may be attributed to the translation by Robert C. Stephenson, which overall is way too literal, even going so far as to let the reader know that the “Venus de Milo” in fact means “Venus of Milo.” A little more syntactical license on the part of the translator would have made for a smoother read.
For the most part Orozco defines himself in negative terms. That is to say, he talks a lot about what he doesn’t believe in without telling us much about what he does believe in. He’s against the traditional academic methods of art instruction, but when modernism comes along and elevates the status of the uneducated artist, he’s against that too. He’s against the imperialism of European modernism, but doesn’t care much for the resurgence of indigenous pride in Mexico either. He doesn’t seem to want to commit to any political movement, or even to any nation. He considers himself a citizen of the world, and feels most at home in that most worldly of cities, New York.
A certain degree of egotism may be required to write a good autobiography. From this book one might surmise that Orozco had a very small ego indeed. His contemporaries Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros may have been pompous, self-aggrandizing blowhards, but perhaps that’s the kind of personality required to pen an interesting and engaging memoir. There may be a good biography of Orozco out there somewhere, but he didn’t write it.
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