A colorful love letter to Greek history.
A celebrated Greek writer and illustrator teams up with a cultural studies theorist and an animator to tell the story of the ancient origins of Athenian democracy.
Best known for the graphic work Logicomix (2008), about a foundational quest in mathematics, Papadatos, along with Kawa and Di Donna (who also contributed to Logicomix), opens the tale in 490 B.C.E. with the Athenians at war with the Persian tyrant Darius. The book’s main character and moral voice is Leander (of the ancient Greek myth of Hero and Leander), a young man with a talent for art who spends his days painting the stories of Greek mythology. In much the same way, Papadatos and his collaborators paint a vivid picture of ancient Athens with all its conflicts, conspiracies, old gods, and new greed. In time, Leander falls in with the aristocrat Cleisthenes, one of a triumvirate credited with the birth of democratic ideals, along with the statesmen Solon and Ephialtes. “Maybe something’s coming,” Cleisthenes says to the crowd. “Something that will crystallize Athenian culture into an entirely different form, one better suited to survival.” Leander serves as the chorus, but he also stands for the common man as he struggles to understand how these new ideas are necessary to end the old system of tyranny and fear. This is fairly heavy history, but by presenting it in the graphic form, the creators leave the story open to interpretation while at the same time making a vital moment in world history accessible for younger readers. Kawa explains their thinking in a thoughtful coda. “We wanted to tell the story of people like us, who, throughout history, have to face the tidal waves brought on by…cataclysmic events—and make sense of them.” World history teachers would do well to make use of this book, which includes a short afterword with commentary about the book’s central characters, important sites, and other aspects of Athenian culture.
A colorful love letter to Greek history.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60819-719-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the...
Lewis (The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, 2016, etc.) turns timely political reporting he published in Vanity Fair into a book about federal government bureaucracies during the first year of the Donald Trump presidency.
At first, the author’s curiosity about the relationship between individual citizens and massive federal agencies supported by taxpayer dollars did not lead him to believe the book would become a searing indictment of Trump. However, Lewis wisely allowed the evidence to dictate the narrative, resulting in a book-length indictment of Trump’s disastrous administration. The leading charge of the indictment is what Lewis terms “willful ignorance.” Neither Trump nor his appointees to head government agencies have demonstrated even the slightest curiosity about how those agencies actually function. After Trump’s election in November 2016, nobody from his soon-to-be-inaugurated administration visited federal agencies despite thorough preparation within those agencies to assist in a traditionally nonpartisan transition. Lewis primarily focuses on the Energy Department, the Agriculture Department, and the Commerce Department. To provide context, he contrasts the competent transition teams assembled after the previous elections of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Displaying his usual meticulous research and fluid prose, the author makes the federal bureaucracy come alive by focusing on a few individuals within each agency with fascinating—and sometimes heartwarming—backstories. In addition, Lewis explains why each of those individuals is important to the citizenry due to their sometimes-arcane but always crucial roles within the government. Throughout the book, unforgettable tidbits emerge, such as the disclosure by a Forbes magazine compiler of the world’s wealthiest individuals list that only three tycoons have intentionally misled the list’s compilers—one of the three is Trump, and another is Wilbur Ross, appointed by Trump as Commerce Secretary.
As with nearly all of Lewis’ books, this one succeeds on so many levels, including as a well-written primer on how the government serves citizens in underappreciated ways.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-324-00264-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
James Baldwin has come a long way since the days of Notes of a Native Son, when, in 1955, he wrote: "I love America more than any other country in the world; and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually." Such bittersweet affairs are bound to turn sour. The first curdling came with The Fire Next Time, a moving memoir, yet shot through with rage and prophetic denunciations. It made Baldwin famous, indeed a celebrity, but it did little, in retrospect, to further his artistic reputation. Increasingly, it seems, he found it impossible to reconcile his private and public roles, his creative integrity and his position as spokesman for his race. Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, for example, his last novel, proved to be little more than a propagandistic potboiler. Nor, alas, are things very much better in No Name In the Street, a brief, rather touchy and self-regarding survey of the awful events of the '60's — the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difficulties of the Black Panther Party, the abrasive and confused relationships between liberals and militants. True, Baldwin's old verve and Biblical raciness are once more heard in his voice; true, there are poignant moments and some surprisingly intimate details. But this chronicle of his "painful route back to engagement" never really comes to grips with history or the self. The revelatory impulse is present only in bits and pieces. Mostly one is confronted with psychological and ideological disingenuousness — and vanity as well.
Pub Date: May 26, 1972
ISBN: 0307275922
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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