Timely, important work about a concept key to understanding contemporary geopolitics.
A prominent Chinese artist/activist in exile explores censorship by examining the role it has played in his life.
In this collection of 20 short essays, Ai muses on the “irreconcilable conflict” between the “human values and rights” he openly champions and the suppressive tactics employed by the Chinese government. The censorship he has experienced since 2009—and which he documents throughout the book with black-and-white documentary-style photographic images—has included having his name “disappeared” from public and artistic spheres throughout China. Yet he is quick to also point out that censorship is not exclusive to authoritarian regimes and “exists everywhere,” including liberalized democratic societies. In the United States, for example, it exists more subtly as “self-censorship.” American capitalism uses “wealth, safety and comfort” as “core values upon which to construct…public discourse”: Any expression that deviates from those values risks being called out as posing a “threat” to both social and personal liberty. Ai suggests that part of what makes censorship in any social context so insidious is the way it frames itself ideologically as normal, necessary, and justifiable. He further argues that the rise of Big Tech (and especially AI) has only magnified the power of censorship by enhancing and refining methods of surveillance. He writes, “[e]ffortless and precise, [new technologies hold] the potential to eliminate any dissenting thoughts and behaviours.” Perhaps most concerning of all is the way censorship creates a space for “fake news” meant to confuse citizens and rob them of confidence in both media and institutions. The end result is a society that “abandon[s] the pursuit of truth altogether.” As it defines censorship, Ai’s book eloquently defends self-expression as essential to both human freedom and the pursuit of a meaningful life.
Timely, important work about a concept key to understanding contemporary geopolitics.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780500030820
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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