For three decades Coles, 65 – a child psychiatrist, author and Harvard professor – has collected the stories of people like Kristin. He won a Pulitzer in 1978 for his study “Children of Crisis,” a collection of personal narratives. With DoubleTake, an elegant – and at $10 an issue, pricey – new quarterly produced out of Duke University, he has turned his keen eye and ear to the magazine world. “We realized there was no other outlet for this work,” he says plainly. “For good stories and good photographs without any academic theory or politics.”
The first issue reflects Coles’s passion for places, histories and their odd juxtapositions: photo essays of Mennonite Mexicans in Ontario and Salvadoran gangs in L.A. a marvelous short story about a flying rabbi in Tennessee. Most striking is a 16-page collection of photos by children documenting their dreams. Blunt, unaffected, it is the young magazine at its best: a snapshot of a culture taken when no one was looking.
