Philip L. Fradkin
Список книг автора Philip L. FradkinThe Left Coast
Philip L. Fradkin, one of California’s most acclaimed environmental historians, felt drawn to the coast as soon as he arrived in California in 1960. His first book, <i>California: The Golden Coast</i>, captured the wonder of the shoreline’s natural beauty along with the controversies it engendered. In <i>The Left Coast</i>, the author and his photographer son Alex Fradkin revisit some of the same places they explored together in the early 1970s. From their written and visual approaches, this father-son team brings a unique generational perspective to the subject. Mixing history, geography, interviews, personal experiences, and photographs, they find a wealth of stories and memorable sights in the multiplicity of landscapes, defined by them as the Wild, Agricultural, Residential, Tourist, Recreational, Industrial, Military, and Political coasts. Alex Fradkin’s expressive photographs add a layer of meaning, enriching the subject with their distinctive eloquence while bringing a visual dimension to his father’s words. In this way, the book becomes the story of a close relationship within a probing study of a varied and contested coastline.
Everett Ruess
Everett Ruess was twenty years old when he vanished into the canyonlands of southern Utah, spawning the myth of a romantic desert wanderer that survives to this day. It was 1934, and Ruess was in the fifth year of a quest to record wilderness beauty in works of art whose value was recognized by such contemporary artists as Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. From his home in Los Angeles, Ruess walked, hitchhiked, and rode burros up the California coast, along the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and into the deserts of the Southwest. In the first probing biography of Everett Ruess, acclaimed environmental historian Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond the myth to reveal the realities of Ruess’s short life and mysterious death and finds in the artist’s astonishing afterlife a lonely hero who persevered.
