A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.
A plangent diatribe against war.
In his latest, Hedges argues that “preemptive war is a war crime,” including in the Ukraine, but the West made Russia do it by extending NATO into Eastern Europe, so that “Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry.” And because Russian was the primary language of most Crimeans, why should Russia not have annexed the peninsula? The author’s condition-tinged discussion—which simultaneously damns and excuses the war in Ukraine—soon grows tiresome, especially because Hedges does not extend the same “yes, but” privilege to, say, Germany in its invasion of German-speaking Sudetenland or the U.S. in its invasion of Iraq. While excoriating the Biden administration for being stocked with presumed nationalists such as Anthony Blinken and Kimberly Kagan (the latter’s crime being, apparently, that she founded a think tank that studies war), Hedges writes, “When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become…the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.” Is Putin an invented foe? That seems a dividing-line question: If you answer in the affirmative, you’ll likely keep reading, and if not, not. A noted leftist critic, Hedges was a contributor to the now-shuttered Russian TV channel RT America, which may explain the rationalizations, against which his concluding prayer that we see “an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all” seems halfhearted—particularly when it’s preceded by a call for a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine. Elsewhere, Hedges rehearses the usual charges, few surprising: War is bad because civilians get hurt, soldiers are scarred (“The worst trauma is often caused not by what combat veterans witnessed but by what they did”), corporations become rich, and so on.
A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64421-293-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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 top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.
The acclaimed director displays his talents as a film critic.
Tarantino’s collection of essays about the important movies of his formative years is packed with everything needed for a powerful review: facts about the work, context about the creative decisions, and whether or not it was successful. The Oscar-winning director of classic films like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs offers plenty of attitude with his thoughts on movies ranging from Animal House to Bullitt to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Big Chill. Whether you agree with his assessments or not, he provides the original reporting and insights only a veteran director would notice, and his engaging style makes it impossible to leave an essay without learning something. The concepts he smashes together in two sentences about Taxi Driver would take a semester of film theory class to unpack. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed To Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake without actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. Like any good critic, Tarantino reveals bits of himself as he discusses the films that are important to him, recalling where he was when he first saw them and what the crowd was like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the author was raised by movie-loving parents who took him along to watch whatever they were watching, even if it included violent or sexual imagery. At the age of 8, he had seen the very adult MASH three times. Suddenly the dark humor of Kill Bill makes much more sense. With this collection, Tarantino offers well-researched love letters to his favorite movies of one of Hollywood’s most ambitious eras.
A top-flight nonfiction debut from a unique artist.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311258-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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