A worthwhile primer for adoring acolytes, but too much P.T. Barnum and not enough behind-the-scenes insights for a broader...
Comic book legend Lee offers fans a graphic autobiography in his inimitably jaunty style.
There’s no denying Lee’s place in the pop-culture pantheon. As the writer and co-creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, and numerous other spandex-clad superheroes, he not only influenced subsequent generations of writers and artists, but also laid the foundation for the multibillion-dollar movie franchises those characters have since spawned. Along with co-writer David (Artful: A Novel, 2014, etc.) and artist Doran (The Vampire Diaries, 2014, etc.)—whose detailed linework is superb—Lee recounts his hardscrabble youth in Manhattan; his entry into a nascent comic-book industry still dominated by horror, Westerns, and romances; military service in World War II, during which he was responsible for the creation of a particularly memorable poster reminding soldiers to do their duty to get treated for venereal disease; and rise from intern to icon as superheroes came to dominate the comics landscape (in large part due to Lee’s efforts). After years of being accused of perhaps claiming too much credit for his creations, Lee casts ample spotlight on artists like Jack “King” Kirby (X-Men, Fantastic Four) and Steve Ditko (Spider-Man), who played equally important roles in developing the heroes that are so ubiquitous today, but he makes sure the light shines brightest on himself. The author’s influence on the comics industry cannot be overstated; even if he sometimes gets too much credit for creating characters and stories, he doesn’t get enough recognition for being the driving force behind connecting those characters to an audience hungry for flawed human heroes. One might argue, however, that among his myriad creations, one of his most impressive—and persuasive—may very well be the legendary Stan Lee himself.
A worthwhile primer for adoring acolytes, but too much P.T. Barnum and not enough behind-the-scenes insights for a broader audience.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0772-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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