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An inspiring biography of one of the most successful photojournalists of the 20th century, this life of Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) is exactly the type of book teachers and parents of adolescent girls are looking for. It would be a mistake to treat this as a book for girls only, however, when so many great men--Bourke-White's father, her second husband, several darkroom technicians, and even General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the 12th Air Force in World War II--figure prominently in it as mentors, teachers, colleagues, and friends. Author Susan Goldman Rubin gracefully deals with sensitive material such as the photographer's shame at discovering that her father was Jewish. And she does a remarkable job of choosing appropriate pictures. As the chief photographer for
Life magazine, Bourke-White shot many hugely important but often harsh subjects. Rubin deftly edits these images so that famous photos like the haunting
Living Dead of Buchenwald, April, 1945 are here, but not such profoundly disturbing ones as Bourke-White's shot of bony corpses stacked for burning. The author underscores the photographer's extraordinary self-confidence as a young woman of huge ambitions and--beginning with Bourke-White's initial flirtation with the soft-focus style of Edward Steichen--delineates the growing power and clarity of her mature documentary style. Bourke-White's life-long interest in science--she kept jars of multilegged fauna on her office bookshelves at
Life--is fascinating, and the stories of her wartime adventures--in marooned life rafts, low-flying reconnaissance planes, and torpedoed ships--are frighteningly vivid.
The photographs themselves are ultimately given pride of place, in large duotone reproductions that do them ample justice. This book would be right for anyone over 10, and older readers might go on to Sean Callahan's Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer, which is more of a traditional monograph and includes those images that tell truths so painful that Bourke-White herself had great difficulty sorting their negatives. --Peggy Moorman
Growing up, Bourke-White lived with the kind of courage and passion that makes her the perfect inspiration for readers of any age. Having been taught discipline from her mother and confidence from her father, she always knew that she would be successful on her own terms. In an era when career women struggled at every turn, she quickly became one of the most promising photojournalists in the country. Fearless in her quest for perfection and originality, she often risked her life to represent her subjects authentically. As one of the "Founding Four" photographers of
Life magazine, she took foreign assignments during World War II, and her battlefield photos brought the horrors of war close to home for a mass audience. Besides being one of the only photographers to have sittings with Stalin, Churchill, and Patton, she also took some of the most horrifying pictures of the Holocaust. Later assignments sent her to India, South Africa, and Korea, where her heartbreaking images and writing solidified her place in history. While focusing the bulk of this text on the photographic work, Rubin does a brilliant job of bringing in personal elements that resonate with real emotion. The Holocaust photographs are all the more stirring in light of Bourke-White's own shame over a Jewish ancestry she did not learn about until adulthood. Two failed marriages and a fight with Parkinson's disease round out a life story as vivid as the rich photographs that abound throughout this book, by far one of the best biographies of the year.
Roger Leslie
