Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange by Elizabeth Partridge (2001-10-01) - Hardcover

"I grew up in a large, eccentric family in the San Francisco Bay Area. My grandmother was photographer Imogen Cunningham, and my grandfather, Roi Partridge, was an etcher. There were five kids in my family, and we lived in an enormous house full of dogs and cats, chameleons, fish, tortoises, and even a pet tarantula.

My father, Roi Partridge, grew up loving photography and helping his mother, Imo, in the darkroom. When he was just seventeen she sent him to apprentice with her friend, photographer Dorothea Lange. Over the next few years he was gradually drawn into Dorothea's family. When he married and my parents had kids, we were included in the diverse bunch of children, step-children and grandchildren that made up Dorothea's family. Thanksgiving, Christmas and Fourth of July were all made magical by Dorothea's extraordinary celebrations and rituals.

In 1974, I was the first student to graduate with a degree in Women's Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. A year later I went to Great Britain to study Chinese medicine, earning a Licentiate of Acupuncture in 1978 and returning to the Bay Area to practice acupuncture and herbal medicine.

In the early nineties I began writing books as well as practicing medicine. I love the wide array of genres within the field of children's books, and especially enjoy writing biographies, historical fiction, and picture books.

My first book, Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Smithsonian, 1993) was followed by a middle grade novel, Clara and the Hoodoo Man (Dutton, 1996), and Restless Spirit: the Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (Viking, Fall 1998), a photo biography for young adults. Pig's Eggs came out last year (Golden Books, Spring 2000). Oranges on Golden Mountain has just been released (Dutton, Spring 2001), and will soon be followed by an easy reader, Annie and Bo (Spring 2002) and my biography on Woody Guthrie (Viking, Spring 2002).

I still live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband and two sons, practicing Chinese medicine and writing books."

copyright © 2000 by Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved.

Gr. 6^-12. Lange's stirring black-and-white photographs, more than 60 of them, exquisitely reproduced, provide the drama in this biography of the famous camera artist. Here are the famous pictures that brought the nation up close to the man on the bread line during the Depression, a migrant mother unable to feed her children, a sharecropper in the South, a homeless child on the road, a Japanese American family interned during World War II. The beautiful, spacious design of this photo-essay, with thick quality paper, clear type, and brief quotes from Lange at the head of each chapter, invites you to come back and look and look at her work. The pictures show how Lang got close to people and that she caught her subjects in relation to harsh, powerful events and to one another. Partridge draws on letters, journals, and oral history to give a strong sense of Lange's personal struggles as a child, a wife, and a mother; her lasting pain at her father's desertion; her shame over the disability caused by a childhood bout with polio; and her awareness as an adult that that vulnerability helped her in her work. The author also provides an insider's viewpoint: as a child, she knew Lange. Partridge's father became Lange's assistant at the age of 17, and he worked with her for years in the field and in the darkroom. Many of the photos of Lange in the book are by him, including some of Lange with the child Elizabeth. Like Freedman's, Martha Graham , this fine photo-essay will interest adults as much as teens. A Junior Library Guild Selection. Hazel Rochman