Why did Brett love this book?
I became interested in Dorothea Lange last year when I picked up a compilation of her photographs documenting the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. These images had been censored by the US government for decades, kept under wraps.
One of them depicts a young boy seated on the stoop of his barracks, engrossed in a comic book, one that happens to have been published by my great-uncle, the subject of my recent book!
Driven to learn all I could about the circumstances of this photograph, I read Linda Gordon’s wonderful biography of Lange. A master of the form, Gordon uses the pathbreaking photographer’s life to illuminate 20th-century American social history.
2 authors picked Dorothea Lange as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
We all know Dorothea Lange's iconic photos-the Migrant Mother holding her child, the shoeless children of the Dust Bowl-but now renowned American historian Linda Gordon brings them to three-dimensional life in this groundbreaking exploration of Lange's transformation into a documentarist. Using Lange's life to anchor a moving social history of twentieth-century America, Gordon masterfully re-creates bohemian San Francisco, the Depression, and the Japanese-American internment camps. Accompanied by more than one hundred images-many of them previously unseen and some formerly suppressed-Gordon has written a sparkling, fast-moving story that testifies to her status as one of the most gifted historians of our…