Passionate to a fault, in a way that’s inspiring even as it becomes furiously repetitive.
The noted cartoonist’s first collection renders modern politics as lamentable spectacle.
Modern political cartoonists come in two varieties: The gray-haired dinosaurs doing carefully mild bipartisan humor for the big dailies get what meager glory there is; the rest are mired in the netherworld of free alternative weeklies, hopefully away from the escort ads. Sutton belongs to the latter group; his profanely funny work is seen most often in the Village Voice, occasionally in publications as far flung as the New York Times. While this roundup is far from essential reading, there’s enough good material here to warm the heart of any good blue-state resident. Sutton tends to work from roughly a half-dozen topics: the spinelessness of Democrats, the warmongering of the Bush White House, the cowardice of the mainstream media, the utter and depraved evil of Dick Cheney. His tone of unrelieved and exasperated anger is free from the irony of cozier satirists like Jon Stewart. The clownish artwork and constant, juvenile nastiness can be cloying after a while, as evidence by the one-panel of Donald Rumsfeld masturbating to war footage, a joke that might have seemed funny to someone putting together a college newspaper at four in the morning. Nothing here achieves the satiric insight of, say, Tom Tomorrow, one of Sutton’s closest peers. That said, one strip, “Visitors,” achieves a sublime greatness through its horrific portrait of a man desperately waving from a smoking window of the World Trade Center. Wondering if anyone can see him, he has visions of everyone from a soldier (“I can see you. Your death will motivate me to kill others”), to a lawyer (“I’ll fight to get you and your survivors a sizable, respectable settlement”), to Osama bin Laden (“I can see you. And I’m laughing”). It also stands out simply because it’s one of the only pieces here to deviate from the usual carping.
Passionate to a fault, in a way that’s inspiring even as it becomes furiously repetitive.Pub Date: June 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58322-677-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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