The reports compose a portrait in futility: the enemy was strong, the post's ranks were small and counterinsurgency efforts had no traction.
With novelistic thoroughness, Mr. Padilha and Mr. Lacerda take the audience on a tour of the slums, the courts and the jails, composing a portrait of the hijacker and the world that formed him.
In "Chronically Unfeasible," Mr. Bianchi uses several representative figures -- including a cranky college professor, a waiter with an anarchist streak, an Indian woman who has reinvented herself as a capitalist and a black woman who works as a maid for a white woman who was her childhood friend -- to compose a portrait of a country on the brink of breakdown.
With his new documentary, The Lure, British documentarian Tomas Leach employs a quiet lyricism to compose a portrait of these fanatic treasure hunters and their relationship with Fenn, the wizened old man with a twinkle in his eye pulling the strings on their feverish quest.
During the 1970s, Glynn drew a series of striking portraits of, among others, Stoppard, John Wood, Brian Eno, novelist Isobel Strachey, the aged Duncan Grant and the American composer Virgil Thomson, who became a staunch friend and later composed a piano portrait entitled Glynn Boyd Harte Reaching.
In describing the rituals of a family of the Sicilian landed aristocracy, its close interaction with the peasants, and the many shared traditions, Agnello Hornby composed a complex portrait of post-World War II rural Sicily.
Rohde knew Munadi well, and he's composed a moving portrait; other colleagues remember him, too; and Munadi himself wrote this short account of his own life a week before he was killed.
Ung's anecdotes composed a chaotic portrait, and there was truth in it Philadelphia had one of the highest crime rates in America but they didn't give him much context, and the city, in fact, was safer than it had been in years.
Two years later, using the photographs of Jean Mohr not as illustration but as integrated text, he composed "A Fortunate Man," a portrait of an English country doctor that eschewed all sentimental anecdotage but pondered the nature of medical service and community, as well as our acceptance of, and need for, death.
After all, a writer must have a fine sense of narrative balance in order to compose a convincing portrait of deeply depressed people without deeply depressing her readers.
