Ruth Gruber’s Photojournalism at Soho Photography

/2 Comments/in , , , /by

To mark Jewish American Heritage Month, Open Road Media–which has recently brought out five ebooks by my longtime author Ruth Gruber–has published a celebratory post on the Open Road Blog. In addition, Ruth’s photojournalism, for which she’s received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award, is on exhibit through June 2 at the gallery Soho Photography on White Street in Tribeca. Among Ruth’s mentors was Edward Steichen, who exhorted her to “Take pictures with your heart.” I recommend you read Ruth’s inspiring books and go see her photographs, including the two accompanying this post. The image above was taken when Ruth was sent to Alaska in 1940 by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, her boss in the FDR administration; the one below was taken aboard the prison ship Runnymede Park, on which the refugees from the Exodus were forcibly sequestered during the summer of 1947, a chronicle that Ruth tells in her book Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation, which is illustrated with more than 100 of her photographs. I published it with Ruth in hardcover in 1999, and in trade paperback in 2008. It is still only available in hard copy, and is not yet among the ebooks from Open Road. For the record, the titles available as ebooks are Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America; Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; Raquela: A Woman of Israel; Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman; and Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of an excellent documentary covering mostly the first four decades of Ruth’s life). For readers’ handy reference, I’ve previously blogged about Ruth Gruber, here and here.

Read more

Celebrating Woody Guthrie at the Brooklyn Folk Festival

/1 Comment/in , /by

I was at the opening of the Brooklyn Folk Festival last night when the upcoming 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie was observed. There were a number of great performances and I’ll be heading out there again later today for Day II. If you’re looking for live music tonight this is going to be a great place to hang out. The venue is in downtown Brooklyn, at 345 Jay Street near Metrotech, very close to an A train subway stop. Highlights of Day I included, but by no means were limited to these memorable moments:

  • Hearing Ernie Vega and Samoa Wilson of Four Flowers sing Woody’s “I Ain’t Got No Home,” whose melody seemed a close cousin to the equally classic, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” also the name of a 30s movie with Al Jolson;
  • listening to John Longhi read from his father’s memoir, Woody, Cisco, and Me, that chronicles the time the three friends shared as merchant seamen during WW II;
  • listening to Greenwich Village 60s era folk stalwart John Cohen read from lists of hundreds of song lists that Woody catalogued alphabetically–all the songs that began with the letter ‘H,’ all that began with the letter, ‘L,’ etc. Woody knew hundreds of songs. It was like one of those extravagant lists that John McPhee is wont to put in his long New Yorker pieces. I met Cohen after his reading and told him that what he read from Woody’s notebook (John brought the original valise and notebook with him) was like a symphony in commas;
  • Finally hearing Peter Stamfels, leader of the psychedelic 60s jug band, The Holy Modal Rounders, who was in the house with his current group Ether Frolic Mob. They’re a boisterous seven-piece outfit full of primal hoots and hollers led by Stamfel on banjo and fiddle and his daughter, Zoë Stampfel, who, seated near her dad, played the djumbe drum and really tore up the tracks. John Cohen also sat in with this assemblage.
  • Dennis Lichtman’s Brain Cloud, who played inspired, hot, western swing, and had an amazing vocalist, Tamara Korn, who threw her voice in all sorts of ways, imitating other instruments in the band–clarinet, fiddle, pedal steel, lead guitar–twinning with them in her sweet, darting voice. It was something special to behold/behear.

As I posted on this blog a couple days ago, Eli Smith directs the festival, now in its fourth year, in coordination with a Brooklyn cultural institution called the Jalopy Theatre. I learned last night that up until a few weeks they believed the festival would be held in the same venue as last year, which included some outdoor space, but it suddenly became unavailable to them; fortunately, they found an alternate venue. It’s a converted hardware store in downtown Brooklyn, which is quite spacious and conveniently located near the Jay St. stop on the A train. Eli and his cohorts did a fabulous job of converting the space and lending to it a theatre-like ambiance with stage lighting, maroon curtains all around the stage, and handsome murals evocative of old Brooklyn and New York harbor. They are to be congratulated for figuring all this out at the veritable last minute. Photographs that I took last night will be found below. It was a great night and I’m headed back later tonight, and possibly Sunday. I urge you to stop by for this fine example of homegrown, acoustic musical entertainment. // more. . . click through to full post for all photos

 

Read more

#FridayReads, May 18–“Atlantic Fever”, “Anatomy of Injustice,” and “Bad Blood”

/0 Comments/in /by

#FridayReads, May 18–Joe Jackson’s Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, with a cast of obsessed and scheming aviators who all wanted to make Paris first. Among the schemers is Admiral Richard E. Byrd, whose machinations and manipulations on the stage of world-class feat-making would make him almost as legendary as Lindbergh. In the 1990s and early 2000s I published Jackson’s first three books, including the co-authored Dead Run, with an Introduction by William Styron. Jackson’s a very gifted writer of narrative nonfiction. Kirkus Reviews says of his latest: “With stirring detail and perceptive insight about the pilots and the public, Jackson recaptures the tone and tenor of a frantic era’s national obsession.”

Also reading and finishing two powerful true-crime narratives: Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong, Raymond Bonner’s masterful dissection of a flawed and corrupt prosecution of an innocent man; and Casey Sherman’s Bad Blood: Freedom and Death in the White Mountains, a compelling tick-tock of a deadly case I know too well, the violent 2007 episode in New Hampshire, near where I attended Franconia College, when a cop and and a young man he had stopped both ended up shot dead.

Read more

Savoring Great Books with a Dying Parent

/3 Comments/in , /by

Longtime book world friend Will Schwalbe published a lovely Op-Ed on Mother’s Day, drawn from his forthcoming The End of Your Life Book Club. It opens with Will and his ailing mother in a medical office awaiting a chemotherapy appointment. He asks her what she’s reading–it’s Wallace Stegner’s aptly titled Crossing To Safety. “It was a book that I’d always pretended to have read, but never actually had. That day, I promised her I’d read it.” Soon, over the months of treatment and convalescence until her passing, they find mutual comfort in discussing the books they are reading in a kind personal book club all their own.

It’s touching story, and as I read the column I found myself in Will’s place, glad for the solace provided by these books and the opportunity for closeness shared reading offered them.

Having operated a family-owned bookstore–Undercover Books in Cleveland, Ohio–and later losing both my parents, Earl and Sylvia, and my brother Joel, I look back on all the books we shared and enjoyed over the years. I just have to look at my home library and dozens of memories and conversations come cascading forth, from the novels alone: Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale; Peter Rushforth’s, Kindergarten; Jack Finney’s Time and Again; Mary Tirone-Smith’s The Book of Phoebe; James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss; Howard Frank Mosher’s Disappearances; Philip Kerr’s March Violets; Ernest Hebert’s Dogs of March. This list could go on indefinitely.

Will’s new book will be out in the fall. I’m eager to read it.


Read more

The Brooklyn Folk Festival, May 18-20

/2 Comments/in , /by

There’s a terrific music festival coming up in downtown Brooklyn this weekend, the Brooklyn Folk Festival, and I’m planning to take in some of the festivities with my wife and son. Highlights include a special observance on Friday night marking the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie; workshops on singing, banjo and mandolin; and performances by Peter Stampfel (ex- of the Holy Modal Rounders) and the Ether Frolic Mob, and by the Wretched Refuse String Band. It takes place Friday night, and begins at noon on Saturday and Sunday, stretching late into the nights. These two videos, with performances by Jerron Paxton and Clifton Hicks are highlights from last year’s program. This is going to be the fourth rendition of the festival, and every year they’ve had stellar line-ups. This year festival director Eli Smith has arranged for more than thirty acts over the three days, plus film screenings and appearances by authors of such books as Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival. I hope to see you there.

Read more

Results in for Goodreads Independent Book Blogger Awards

/0 Comments/in , /by

I’m happy to announce that The Great Gray Bridge was in the end a finalist in Goodreads’ Independent Book Blogger Awards, in the Publishing Industry category. While this result is extremely gratifying, alas, it was not the winner. I want to thank the hundreds of readers who voted for this blog, and who helped make it a finalist, and after only six months of publication. Full results may be found here via this link on the Goodreads site, which includes the names of the winners in each of the four categories, and all fifteen finalists in each category who did not win. I’m grateful they held the contest and appreciative that I was able to enter my blog in it. I know it’s brought more readers to this site and I’m thankful for that.

Read more

Imaginary Cities, Embarking on a US Tour

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Readers of this blog may recall how partial I am to Imaginary Cities, a great band from Winnipeg, Canada. They are a five-piece outfit with Marti Sabit providing soaring lead vocals, Rusty Matyas on tasty lead guitar and trumpet, David Landreth on a great thumping bass, Ryan Voth connecting on drums, and Alex Campbell sweetening things up on keyboard. In April I had gone to the release party for their album “Temporary Resident” and had a great talk that night with Marti and Rusty. They were back in town this week, at Mercury Lounge, and I went out to hear them. Again, they played a great show and seemed to really connect with the good-sized Tuesday night crowd. For a full review of their performance style and striving songs, you may read the post I put up after the release party, at this link. For today, here are details on their current US tour, which tonight, May 17, will have them in Washington, D.C. at a club called Black Cat, continuing to such venues as Maxwell’s in  Hoboken, near NYC on June 15, capping off at Lollapalooza in Chicago in August.  Info on the tour is at this link, and below is a chart showing the cities where they’re playing on this tour and photos from this week’s show. // click through to full post for full tour schedule and photos

Read more

Horst Faas–Brave and Brilliant Photojournalist, 1933-2012

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Horst Faas, the great photojournalist who covered conflicts in Bangla Desh, the Congo, and most famously Vietnam, died last week at age 79. In the 1960s he was a colleague to David Halberstam and Peter Arnett, among other notable reporters and correspondents. Faas’s longtime Associated Press colleague Richard Pyle has written the AP’s obituary and a personal remembrance of his dear friend and colleague, both of which are posted on the New York Times‘s superb Lens blog. With warmth and affection Pyle calls this period of his life “The Story That Never Ends.” His personal essay includes an account of the final reporting trip the two friends made together, in 1998, searching for the remains of four  photographers–Larry Burrows of Life magazine, Kent Potter of United Press International, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek, and Henri Huet of Associated Press–all of whom were aboard a helicopter over Laos that crashed in 1971. In 2004 as co-authors the two published, Lost in Laos: A True Story of Tragedy, Mystery, and Friendship, their book on this incident and its aftermath. All photos for this post are credited to Horst Faas and/or the AP, gratefully borrowed for reproduction here so my readers can see Faas’s genius and his empathy, before seeing even more of his work via the key links to Pyle’s obituary and his personal remembrance. Click through to full post for all photos / / more . . .

Read more