A beautiful and poignant memoir demonstrating perseverance and the power of art.
The artist and social activist explores his father’s turbulent relationship with the early Communist regime and his own struggle for creative freedom.
Spurred by his imprisonment in 2011 for “economic crimes” against the authoritarian Chinese government, Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) uses his father’s heartbreakingly difficult life as a point of departure to tell his own story. Born in 1910, just as the Qing dynasty was collapsing, Ai Qing was part of the new idealistic proletariat, trained as an artist and schooled for a year in Paris before taking his place as part of the increasingly ideological cultural force in the new Communist China. But Mao Zedong unleashed waves of political upheaval, and just when the author was born, Ai Qing was exiled during the so-called Anti-Rightist campaign. Most miserably, during the Cultural Revolution, father and sons were sent to “Little Siberia,” on the edge of the Gurbantünggüt Desert, where they lived in “a square hole dug into the ground, with a crude roof formed of tamarisk branches and rice stalks, sealed with several layers of grassy mud.” Still, his father’s indomitable spirit remained intact, and under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, the family was able to return to Beijing. At this point, the author segues into his own restless seeking. He spent more than a decade in New York City before returning to Beijing to try his hand at curating art shows, designing architecture (he consulted on the “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the 2008 Olympics), and engaging in social activism (Black Cover Book). The author eventually ran afoul of the party leadership for his “intolerable insolence,” but the tenacity of his father and his artistic vision have always guided him. “In China,” he writes, “we were still living in a culturally impoverished era, but art had not abandoned us—its roots were deeply planted in the weathered soil.” Throughout, the author maintains a fluid, heartfelt narrative.
A beautiful and poignant memoir demonstrating perseverance and the power of art.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-553-41946-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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