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
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
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
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