A well-crafted visual depiction of the troubling contents of the Mueller Report.
The Mueller Report gets the comic-book treatment in this graphic novel.
The much-anticipated Mueller Report—officially titled Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election and named for Robert Mueller, the special counsel who conducted the probe—was finally released to the public on April 18, 2019. For those whose eyelids get heavy at the very idea of the two-volume, 448-page redacted report, Slate (You Can Do a Graphic Novel, 2018, etc.) offers this condensed, visually stimulating version: a graphic novel of excerpts accompanied by illustrations of the relevant events. Readers can learn all about Russian spies’ posing as Donald Trump supporters on Facebook; the infamous meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian agents in Trump Tower; Trump’s asking for United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation; and Trump’s many colorful tweets. Along the way, the author delivers cartoonish depictions of the major players, often placing their own words—as recorded in the report—into speech bubbles. Even with Slate’s attempts to streamline the report, the book makes for some technical reading. “The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,” reads the first sentence, accompanied by smirking portraits of Vladimir Putin and Russian businessman Yevgeniy Prigozhin. The author’s drawings are simple and quite endearing—if not always flattering to those they portray—and she organizes the narrative in a way that is easy to follow. It’s unclear who would be interested in reading Mueller’s findings at this time given that new Trump scandals have already displaced these older ones in the public’s mind. Still, for those who have not perused the work and need to get the highlights, Slate’s version goes down far easier than the original report. One could imagine it proving a useful tool in the future for readers who wish to understand the particulars of the Russia investigation when it is no longer general knowledge. But for those who just lived through it, the volume is less entertaining than it is distressing, disturbing, and occasionally infuriating.
A well-crafted visual depiction of the troubling contents of the Mueller Report.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-937258-11-8
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Richard Minsky
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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