Short Takes

When her parents died in 2004 and 2005, Kati Marton became obsessed with understanding their history through the Nazi and Communist eras in Hungary. Marton traveled to Budapest to read her parents’ files in the Hungarian secret police archives.

From the disturbingly well-documented files (everyone from neighbors to nannies was a spy), she discovered many family secrets: that her parents both came from Jewish families, that her maternal grandparents had died in Auschwitz, that her parents had both had love affairs, that their marriage survived largely because of a bond formed during their separate but terrible prison terms. She learned more of their glamorous lives as correspondents for American news organizations and as privileged members of the American diplomatic community. She learned the details of their arrests as American spies, their prison experiences, their parts in the failed 1956 revolution, their smooth transit to the west, and their continuing surveillance by both the East and West once they settled in the United States. One of the ironies of this complicated story is that the Martons, productively living and working in the United States, were considered untrustworthy by both sides and would have been valuable recruits for either camp.

Marton also movingly tells her own story as a carefree child, unaware of her parents’ risks, fears, courage. She is glowing in her praise for her daring and dashing father and oddly grudging in her appreciation for her beautiful and brave mother.

DOROTHEA LANGE:
A Life Beyond Limits
By Linda Gordon
Norton, 560 pp., $35

Working for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange invented documentary photography. Her portraits of dejected men and long-suffering women, sweat-drenched migrant farm workers, and sad, dirty children are icons of the age. Her landscapes of dry depleted soil; bleached, parched prairies; roadside camps of improvised shelters made of canvas, tin, cardboard, and brush are the images of rural poverty that define the era. Like her best-known image, “Migrant Mother,’’ “her portraits grip the viewer through their internal tensions between the disordered lives of their subjects and the integrity and stability of their composition, between their subjects’ deprivation and their richness of personality.’’

Lange recorded these images during her 30-year marriage to sociologist Paul Taylor, a partnership in life and work. They traveled together, interviewing and photographing, agitating for fundamental reforms. When not on the road, Lange tried to raise a family: two children of her own, one stepchild from her first marriage to artist Maynard Dixon, and four stepchildren from Taylor. Energetic and ambitious in her professional life, she was neglectful, anxious, and often overwhelmed in her personal life, creating resentments and rivalries. At the end of her life, she achieved the recognition she craved and deserved, a one-woman show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which exhibited not only her work from the Depression, but her photos of Japanese internment camps and ordinary people in Ireland, Ecuador, and Vietnam.

Gordon’s careful and thoughtful biography convinces a reader of Lange’s crucial role in the development of documentary photography and at the same time portrays her as a driven and difficult woman trying to balance work, love, and family.

REDEEMING FEATURES: A Memoir
By Nicholas Haslam
Knopf, 352 pp., $30

While still a schoolboy at Eton, Nicky Haslam attended parties with Tallulah Bankhead, Tony Armstrong-Jones, Diana Cooper, and Alfred and Lynn Lunt. When he was introduced to Cecil Beaton, the famous photographer “rose from a tasseled, cushioned sofa and advanced, a lilac figure in a rose red bower’’ to greet the 15-year-old. By the time Nicky was in his 20s, he had partied with Mick Jagger, Peggy Guggenheim, and Noel Coward.

Young, handsome, nobly born, carelessly raised, and homosexual, Nicky went everywhere and knew everyone. His deliciously gossipy memoir details his life as a house guest, dinner partner, lover, and friend to the rich, beautiful, and talented. What work Nicky did and how he supported himself remain somewhat hazy. He had a small trust, worked for Vogue and Show magazines, designed clubs, and decorated houses. He recommends his work as an interior designer because “there is almost no boundary between the work and the leisure. Every moment is informative, any journey potentially an education, any relationship with clients or craftsmen potentially inspiring, and perhaps they felt we would have fun together.’’ From this account it seems that Nicky had a life filled with fun.

Barbara Fisher is a freelance writer who lives in New York.