An enlightening gallery of spirited essays.
Perceptive observations on American culture.
Sloan, author of The Fluency of Light, gathers 13 essays, written from 2016 to 2020, that range from meditations on the arts to incisive reflections on race. She brings to her writing a lively curiosity and multifaceted identity: She is biracial (Black father, white mother); queer, married, and undergoing in vitro fertilization; an academic who teaches literature and creative writing; and an artist well versed in the work of contemporary painters, such as David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, all of whom figure in her essays, often in unexpected ways. Place figures importantly, too: Sloan grew up in Los Angeles, two blocks from where Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered. The neighborhood, she remembers, “acted toward my father and me as though we wandered into the place by accident.” L.A. is also the setting for an essay connecting the beating of Rodney King, and the riots that ensued, with Hockney’s paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sloan chronicles her visit to Detroit, where her parents moved, and which they portrayed as “a city more laced with wonder than desolation” and “the birthplace of gallerists and world-famous choreographers and raucous family dinners.” Despite the chaos and poverty Sloan observed, she loves the city for its “sense of possibility and kindness,” a love not diminished when she went on a tense ride-along with her cousin, a police officer. A trip to New England with students uncovered evidence of slavery, including at Harvard, where a portrait of donors to the college bears “a placard that says, in essence, ‘We got what we have because we stole and we raped and we murdered.’ ” Police brutality, lucid dreaming, the poetry of Galway Kinnell, and Basquiat’s obsession with the book Gray’s Anatomy all cohere in pieces notable for surprising and revealing juxtapositions.
An enlightening gallery of spirited essays.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452714
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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