The Book Reader: "Mary Coin," "Here I Am"
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Andrew Losowsky of The Huffington Post reports for NY1 on newly released book titles and the world of publishing in "The Book Reader."We are surrounded by photography. Whenever anything vaguely unusual happens, out come a thousand cell phones all snapping and sharing from every possible angle.
But this wasn't always the case.
In the fiction book Mary Coin by Marisa Silver, the most famous photograph to come out of the Great Depression is looked at from three different angles.
The most compelling tale comes from the subject of the photograph, Mary Coin herself; we also hear those of the photographer, and an academic historian in the present day, whose family seems somehow connected to both figures.
A photograph creates a fixed point in time, and Mary Coin is a fascinating look at the ways in which time can stretch before and after that frozen moment, and how a picture that seems so familiar can still contain hidden messages.
Mary Coin is out now in hardcover from Blue Rider Press.
Photography is also the subject of Here I Am, out on March 13 from Grove Press. It's a biography of the war photographer Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya in 2011.
Though Alan Huffman's book is exhaustively researched, Hetherington was a visual artist, so reading about so much of his work just feels like you're missing the most important piece in the puzzle.
An HBO documentary comes out soon, made by Hetherington's friend and collaborator Sebastian Junger. If you're interested in this story, you'd probably do better waiting for that.
You can read about all the hottest reads at huffingtonpost.com/books.