A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more.
With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the U.S. has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness.
Unlike the sprawling yet powerful collection Stewdio, which tried to make sense of the chaos of the early period of the Covid-19 pandemic, the author’s latest has a tight focus and engaging structure. The Public Enemy frontman draws impressionistic portraits of news events and then crafts a rhyme to explain it. “At every turn this summer, so much visible hate…Salman Rushdie…is bum rushed and stabbed on stage in Western New York State,” he writes to accompany a poignant sketch of the incident, including the looks of horror from the audience. The bulk of the events Chuck D chronicles are shootings—at a convenience store in California and a shopping mall in Ohio, or the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—and the continuing disastrous effects of climate change, including flooding in Las Vegas and Texas. This is heavy material, but just as Flavor Flav provided enough levity to balance the hard-hitting subject matter of Public Enemy’s albums, Chuck D’s outside interests—basketball, space exploration, and, of course, hip-hop—lighten the mood enough to keep readers moving through this compelling narrative. Few recaps of the summer of 2022 would include drought’s effect on Lake Mead, a critique of Ye’s fashion designs for The Gap, and the importance of the trade of the Utah Jazz’s Donovan Mitchell to the Cleveland Cavaliers. But that’s how Chuck D’s fascinating mind works, and this chronicle of his interests is both brilliant and relatable. He closes with a poignant plea: “Indian summer awaits to cool down the heat and the hate…Protect your fam this fall…The end of hamn.”
A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781636141527
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Enemy Books/Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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