An uneven but often intriguing look at a modern creative artist.
Lund presents a collection of essays and other short writings.
This compilation kicks off with a review of a 2015 exhibit at Los Angeles’ California Science Center that featured the Dead Sea Scrolls. The author describes the scrolls’ presence as “ghostly,” and the tour as brief, but notes that the experience was still worth the trip. A bit later, the work presents a no-frills description of a Rose Bowl football game (“Eventually, Georgia defeated Oklahoma in double overtime, (54-48)”) and then offers original poetry, which is sometimes startling (“Breakfast / Sits / Like a pine cone / In my ass”), and other times grandiose (“My greatness will be realized despite my mortal cage!”). Not long after an academic essay on Geoffrey Chaucer comes the hardiest fare in the collection—a journal. In brief entries, the author describes his creation of independent comic books over the course of a few years. The journal will provide plenty of tips to the uninitiated, such as the importance of having promotional items at the Alternative Pres Expo in San Francisco. The collection’s final pages offer a short, oddly violent screenplay, featuring characters with names such as “Rock-Head” and “Knuckles Tony”; at one point, a young, female character is described as “Very pretty, but not astonishing.” This book, as its subtitle indicates, encompasses a multitude of odds and ends, which function more as a portrait of their creator than any kind of cohesive narrative. Readers don’t get very many details about what it’s like to live in LA, enjoy the occasional museum visit, and try to make it in the comic book business. However, altogether, the book offers an intimate and inviting précis of the artist himself. That said, certain portions are unhelpfully obtuse; for example, regarding a display of William Shakespeare’s folios, the author vaguely and confusingly observes that “Genius pokes holes in hubris and casts light while many people struggle with their endeavors in the arts.”
An uneven but often intriguing look at a modern creative artist.Pub Date: April 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64426-553-6
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Rosedog Books
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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