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librarygurl's review
4.0
Super fast audiobook and a great look Carroll and the real Alice. I don't know how many times I have seen the famous pictures, but learning more about it was fascinating.
samchase112's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
3.0
Convince, informative, and interesting, but nothing groundbreaking. I know next to nothing about Lewis Carroll or Alice herself, so this was a lovely introduction for me into their relationship, but mostly into 19th-century photography. Diverting, yet ultimately forgettable.
Content Warnings
Minor: Adult/minor relationship
megancm's review
3.0
Very short book about how Charles Dodgson (Lewis Caroll) got into photography, and specifically the background behind the famous photo of the original Alice (Liddell). It was quick and easy to read, and I enjoyed learning a bit more about the history of photography and how Dodgson grew to love it. Worth the read for any big Alice fans out there.
obnorthrup's review
3.0
An interesting read, but it's not really about Alice Liddell. Rather, it's about Charles Dodgson's love of photography. It feels like this was intended to be part of some larger work that Simon Winchester didn't have his heart in.
lakecake's review against another edition
informative
fast-paced
3.5
I didn't realize how brief this book was until I started listening to it--just a few hours! Winchester is an excellent writer, who manages to make everything interesting. This is a brief biography of Lewis Carroll's time as a photographer, which happened to include his friendship with the Liddell family and thus with Alice who inspired Alice in Wonderland. It's a concise but detailed look at the very basic story of how the famous book came to be, with a lot of other fascinating details thrown in.
andrewritchie's review
3.0
I've thoroughly enjoyed Winchester's other books Krakatoa and The Professor and the Madman and rate him highly as a writer.
This book doesn't achieve those heights but is still an interesting read. For me the book falls down as it is largely an account of Charles Dodgson's photography including detailed descriptions of the posing for and composition of the photos without actually including them in the book. This lect it feeling incomplete for me.
This book doesn't achieve those heights but is still an interesting read. For me the book falls down as it is largely an account of Charles Dodgson's photography including detailed descriptions of the posing for and composition of the photos without actually including them in the book. This lect it feeling incomplete for me.
judyward's review
3.0
At only 100 pages, this seems more like a book proposal than a full study. While I thought that the book was going to be about Alice Liddell, the six year old whose image was captured in an iconic photograph (dressed as a beggar girl with cupped hands and a dress that had slipped off one shoulder and exposed half of her chest) and who was the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, she wasn't the main focus. Instead, Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ College, Oxford University, and better known as Lewis Carroll, and his fascination with photograph as both an art and a science commands the most attention. To my surprise, a book that discusses Dodgson's fame as a photographer and describes dozens of his photographs, doesn't include any of them other than the picture of Alice on the cover. A big disappointing.