Photo books show many faces of history

Asbury Park Press
HENRY JACKSON THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

It is easy to think about the American civil rights movement through the context of the few compelling personalities that history books tend to remember.

There are the heroes — Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks. The controversial icons — Malcolm X. And, of course, your clear-cut villains — former Alabama Gov. George Wallace springs to mind. But the modern civil rights movement was not a monolith. It was not limited to a handful of key players whose faces we can remember vividly. It was a multifaceted, multihued journey that swept across America.

It is this notion that provides the quiet beauty and power of "Mine Eyes Have Seen: Bearing Witness to the Struggle for Civil Rights." Through the compelling photography of Bob Adelman, a legendary civil rights photographer, we see a diverse struggle fought on many fronts — from the flexed bicep of boxer George Foreman and the cocked bat of home run king Hank Aaron to the stoic faces of civil rights marchers and images of King himself.

Augmented with essays from Charles Johnson, "Mine Eyes" strips the civil rights movement to its essence. We see the various people and personalities who fueled the movement removed from the summary of an encyclopedia or history book and put into context. Adelman's black and white photographs testify that, if anything, there were many faces to the civil rights movement. It is a powerful testament indeed.

It is a similar approach, though a decidedly more cynical and tawdry premise, that typifies "The Most Notorious Crimes in American History: Fifty Fascinating Cases From the Files.

"If there is a sweeping theme in "Notorious Crimes," it is that violence knows no unique face, nor one unique victim. There are iconic images of the criminals, murderous and deranged (Charles Manson at trial, for example) and comparably pedestrian (Kenneth Lay of Enron fame.)

And there are the victims, some obvious (the three civil rights workers beaten to death and shot by Klansmen in Mississippi in 1964) and some that, one suspects, went through history mostly unnoticed. (A picture of Lee Harvey Oswald's widow and daughter somberly doing laundry after his death.)

For those who believe that America's crime-obsessed tabloid culture is generational and a sign of decline, this book may offer a stiff rejoinder. The images of Lizzie Borden's ax or, for that matter, the snapshots of Chester Gillette (his slaying his lover in 1906 became the basis for Theodore Dreiser's classic "An American Tragedy") and Grace Brown (his lover) offer more than enough evidence that crime, and the sensationalism that most assuredly follows it, have no unique generation.

This is not to say that "Crimes" is without value. As history, imagery and a bit of guilty intrigue, there is plenty of material and it is presented neatly and informatively. And there is, after all, a reason culture fixates on crimes. They're interesting.

credits: app.com

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