Harlem Renaissance Poetry

Yesterday began Black History Month in the USA! The Harlem Renaissance-themed Classics Circuit began yesterday as well, and I hope you follow along as bloggers unite in reading classic works by African-Americans.

Although this post is not for the Circuit, in preparing for that Classics Circuit, I did a lot of preliminary reading about the era and I really wanted to dabble in the poetry. I meant to post this weeks ago, but it never happened and now it’s already February! It works well, though, because I’d like to write at least one post about African-American literature each week in February.

In my library shelf searches, I could not find a comprehensive collection of Countee Cullen and Claude McKay and any of the other, less well known African-American poets of the Renaissance. I still haven’t really found a comprehensive Harlem Renaissance poetry anthology at my library, but I did find an out-of-print 1941 anthology of poetry for children that met my needs. (Thank goodness for my library’s reciprocal borrowing program with 15 other libraries!). This allowed me to read a number of different poets who were writing during the Renaissance and before.

Although Golden Slippers was edited and prepared for a “young readers” audience, it’s applicable to all, and while the poetry in it is not my favorite, it seems to have an important overview of some of the poets of the near-contemporary age to the Renaissance. Researching online, I found more poems by each poet. I also focused on Langston Hughes a little bit in the past few weeks. Continue reading »

Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell

I let myself browse the library a few weeks ago, and I ended up coming home with a huge coffee table book of photography, Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs by Hal Buell. I thought I’d browse through the award-winning photographs and then return it.

To my delight, the short summaries on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs were fascinating as well as the photographs. In just a few days, I found myself engrossed in the stories of the photographs. I had to read it! Continue reading »

Material World by Peter Menzel

In a similar manner to What the World Eats (reviewed here), Material World by Peter Menzel attempts to illustrate the material wealth (or material poverty) of various families around the globe by photographing a family’s household belongings and illustrating the family’s daily life in photographs.

Using full-color photography, each country is highlighted first with a two-page photograph of an “average” family in the street (or a field) with their possessions and a listing of those basic possessions. Then, there is a summary of the country’s history and the family’s statistics, such as house size, family size, and income (which are average for the country). There is also an information bar with statistics relating to the country, such as fertility rate and country population. Text and photographs illustrate the daily life of the chosen families. Continue reading »

Fundamentals of Photography by Tom Ang

Tom Ang’s Fundamentals of Photography is aptly subtitled “the essential handbook for both digital and film cameras.” As a very amateur photographer, I was fascinated by the technical explanations for photography: how cameras work, how light is best captured, and how to process photographs appealingly. While I will never again photograph using film cameras, I was likewise fascinated to learn the technical aspects of film photography. For, just as Tom Ang seamlessly wove both film and digital photography together throughout his handbook, understanding how film photography works should be seamlessly tied to understanding the tools available to a digital photographer. I am convinced that understanding film technology (of which I was woefully ignorant) will help me in my digital processes.

Fundamentals of Photography is a dense book, full of technical terms, explanations, and diagrams. As such, it was challenging to read it cover to cover. Besides, it was a new book at the library, so I had a three-week time limit, which made it all the more challenging. I would have loved to study it over the course of an entire semester in school or maybe during my lifetime – for there are so many details within it that were unfamiliar to me. Despite the difficulty, reading it was incredibly rewarding. Continue reading »

What the World Eats by Peter Menzel

What do you eat in one week? What does a typical American eat? What does a typical Brit eat? What does a family in the Darfur Refugee Camp in Chad eat? What do the people of the world eat?

These are the questions that photographer Peter Menzel seeks to answer through his coffee table book of pictures and information: What the World Eats.

The pictures of families from around the world with their week’s worth of food and the short accounts of their eating habits were interesting. In the end, however, I felt Menzel’s book was forcing a social problem on the reader, and it seemed to further contribute to stereotypes of eating habits around the world. Continue reading »

Caldecott Corner: Mo Willems

While Mo Willems hasn’t been awarded the Caldecott Medal for his children’s picture books, he has been nominated a number of times. Do multiple Honors equal a Medal? I doubt he’d think so. Nevertheless, I think his simple illustrations are award-worthy and therefore worthy of my review.

Here’s a rundown of some of Willems’ books, along with my thoughts on his brilliant illustrations. Continue reading »

From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds by Alexander Tsiaras

When we found out in early 2007 that a little bundle of joy would be joining our family, we headed to the bookstore. Alexander Tsiaras’s lovely coffee table book, From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, came back home with us. I loved pouring over the graphically enhanced photographs of babies in the womb, imagining how my own little one was developing. Now that he is almost a year old, I still enjoy it. Continue reading »

Masterclass in Photography by Michael and Julien Busselle

With the advent of digital cameras, any person can take a photograph. Now we must ask, What makes that person a photographer? In Masterclass in Photography, we find some guidance as to the essential elements in a photograph and how to produce an appealing photograph. As a very amateur photographer myself, I find Michael and Julien Busselle’s Masterclass in Photography to be just the guide I need to find inspiration and images around me. It is a lovely coffee-table book that I will refer to again and again. Continue reading »