Word: poet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Some photographers are the poets of purple mountains' majesty. Some are the poets of the placid suburbs. Weegee is the poet of small-timers who died facedown on a city pavement at 3 a.m. in a pool of their own blood. And petty mobsters. He was great at petty mobsters--half the guys in his pictures look as if their nickname was Mugsy. As one of the most unabashed tabloid-news photographers, Weegee was also supremely good at car crashes, dazed escapees from tenement fires, transvestites being hustled out of paddy wagons, and Peeping Tom shots of lovers wrestling...
...mystic forays into the nature of creation, the poet William Blake questioned both the lamb and the tiger about their origins, asking the tiger who it was who could have possibly crafted its "fearful symmetry." "Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" This year, out of a research institute in Scotland, a lamb named Dolly came roaring similarly existential questions. For Dolly was a clone, and her doubling had a fearful symmetry of a different kind: If sheep could be cloned, could humans be far behind...
...that Barney fills an expansive and unconventional existence. He is the son of Montreal's first Jewish policeman, Izzy Panofsky, who would have been at home in the old Odessa underworld. The younger Panofsky spent the early '50s in Paris, where he debauched with expats and married a crazy poet whose suicide ensured her canonization by academic feminists. What Barney calls "the true story of my wasted life" may seem undisciplined and chronologically impaired. In fact his memoir is cunningly designed for maximum suspense and beaucoup laughs. Going on 67, Barney has total recall of old grudges, past loves...
Czech history is full of political polymaths--the nation's first president, T.G. Masaryk, was trained as a philosopher, while Vaclav Havel was well-known as a dissident playwright long before he ever took office. Miroslav Holub, a Czech poet and well-respected immunologist, is no exception to this tradition. His latest collection of essays, Shedding Life, investigates topics as disparate as animal experimentation, opera and civic engagement. Beneath the surface of these lapidary essays is a compelling political message, a crie-de-coeur against totalitarianism from a scientist who has witnessed ideology's perversion of the truth...
...those who can tolerate Holub's tendency to climb up onto his high horse, Shedding Life should prove a successful marriage of the two cultures, appealing to both poet and pathologist, without condescending to either. Most importantly, Shedding Life proves to be a valuable and surprising perspective on the political climate of Eastern Europe today...