Review by Booklist Review
Alinder was Adams' assistant in his later years, helping curate the great photographer's 40,000 negatives and coauthor his best-selling autobiography. Now, a dozen years after Adams' death, Alinder presents a more complete portrait than Adams allowed. Adams came to photography at the tender age of 14, and it will come as no surprise that he was inspired to pick up the camera by his beloved Yosemite, his wellspring. Adams recognized early on that photography was his medium not for recording reality but for communicating his emotions. As Alinder traces the straight-forward course of Adams' dazzling career--pausing for cameos of numerous influential figures, including John Marin, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and David Brower--she emphasizes the connection between his stunning landscape photography and his zealous work with the Sierra Club. Alinder is as lucid on the topic of Adams' technical mastery as on his environmentalism and aesthetics, and she also tackles the muddle of his contentious private life with aplomb and candor. The Adams that ultimately emerges from these warmhearted pages is a man of "boisterous spirits" and irrepressible creativity deeply devoted to his vision. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Alinder was Ansel Adams's caretaker, nurse and executive assistant from 1979 until the photographer's death in 1984 at the age of 82. This deeply felt, unauthorized biography provides a much fuller picture of Adams's turbulent personal life than his 1985 autobiography, which Alinder coauthored. Adams traveled often, leaving behind his wife, Virginia Best, and their two children; his numerous affairs and continual neglect drained her patience and love, nearly wrecking their marriage. Growing up in San Francisco, with frequent trips to the Yosemite Valley that he would immortalize in crisp, radiant photographs, Adams witnessed the unhappy, formal, proper marriage of his stern, domineering mother and mild father, who usually addressed each other as "Mrs. Adams" or "Mr. Adams." His adult personal life was often in shambles, and he never found emotional happiness, according to Alinder. After 1949, she writes, Adams, paralyzed by fear of failure, suffered creative burnout and turned increasingly from photography to environmental activism and writing. She also discusses his formative friendships with mentor Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe and with photographers Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. Photos. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Having coauthored Adams's Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (1985), Alinder is certainly in the position to write this new work. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A well-documented but flawed life of one of America's most famous photographers and environmentalists. Alinder knows her subject well; she worked for several years as Adams's executive assistant (""on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day""), led the team that helped the master assemble his 1985 memoirs, and coedited his volume Letters and Images, 1916-1984 (not reviewed). Out from under his gaze, Alinder is free to consider Adams more critically than before. She does so only a little, noting, for instance, that for her, an enthusiastic member of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, Adams was ""a monolith: unapproachable because he was unrelatable, an anachronism,"" while the older Imogen Cunningham donned hippie clothes and was part of the scene. In his early years, it develops, Adams was something of a womanizer (no matter whether or not it's germane, no modern biography can escape a look into its subject's sex life), and in later life he acted the curmudgeon, all the while single-mindedly forging a financial empire with his lens. These things Alinder tells us unflinchingly, but she too often falls into starry-eyed, even hyperbolic description, undermining the objectivity of her work: ""Ansel had become world-famous, his name synonymous with both photography and the growing environmental conscience. He had created an awesome string of important images that spoke only of his vision and no one else's?"" There is entirely too much fawning of this sort here, but Alinder covers the main points well, noting especially Adams's signal contributions to the work of the Sierra Club. She notes, as have many others before her, that as a young man Adams trained to be a concert pianist, and his photographs carry an almost musical sense of composition. Alinder's commentary on his style is direct and interesting, and one wishes that there were more of it. Readers familiar with Adams's autobiographical writings will find little new here. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
