From Publishers Weekly
With more than 60 years behind the lens, including a stint as a New Deal documentarian and more than two decades at
Life magazine, Parks is by acclamation the nation's most important African-American photographer. Film fans know him as the man who directed
Shaft, along with several other feature films and well-regarded documentaries, many of them focused on black urban life. Meant to accompany
A Hungry Heart, his fourth prose memoir (also a November book), this collection of Parks's straightforward, sincere verse plays up its links with his pictures, almost 50 of which adorn the book, from abstract photos of crystals and sunsets to closeups of soldiers and candids of people in need. The verse itself consists of clear and sometimes moving meditations on Parks's upbringing ("Momma's words refuse to die./ Instead they grow wings and soar"), on American history and on current events ("Forty killed in Basra today! Small children blown apart!") along with pithy advice from a now 90-year-old working artist: "Keep acting and thinking upward."
(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Gordon Parks is remarkable: a Renaissance man who has mastered photography, filmmaking, and writing. The story of his life is certainly an incredible one, which explains why Parks has written a new memoir titled
A Hungry Heart (2005). This collection of poems and photographs, however, will add yet another dimension to Parks' life story. From the resonant words and lessons of his parents to meditations on current events--terrorism, the tsunami, the war in Iraq--the poems are candid snapshots of Parks' emotional life. Words harmonize with landscape photographs and images of strangers walking through their lives without a sense of being observed. Transcending voyeurism, Parks' photographs reveal vulnerabilities of the human experience with grace and compassion. After all, Parks understands vulnerability and willingly displays it in his writing. In his 90s and still driven to experience what the world has to offer, and to express his response to it, Gordon Parks is an inspiration to us all.
Janet St. JohnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
