by Cris Mazza ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2023
Photographic archaeology turns up long-hidden secrets and interesting meditations on the unexplored corners of life.
Novelist and memoirist Mazza examines an archive of family photos to reconstruct the lives of kinfolk, real and surmised.
It turns out, with respect to the title, that it is a puzzle: You never know what mysteries lie behind a seemingly innocent image. Mazza’s family was photo-happy, and she had the task, after her mother died, of scanning “her many thousands of color slides beginning in 1950, taken before she went back to snapshots in 1982, and to digital in 2005.” The work helped her to wrestle with grief over the deaths of her mother and a beloved dog but also to shelter herself in 2018 from “the looming end of democracy, apparently as hopelessly chaotic as the collapse of my beloved dog’s body.” The author unearths numerous thought-provoking questions: What to make of her father’s Leica-snapped photos in occupied Germany at the end of World War II? Why did only seven slides survive from a storied family trip to Maine? To the latter, Mazza ventures an entirely sensible answer: “Sometimes 35mm film didn’t engage in the camera’s sprockets when loaded, so it wouldn’t advance when wound after each shot.” The author makes fruitful pop-culture connections between the events of her life and whatever was happening on TV. If she didn’t necessarily wish that “my camp-counselor, swimming-coach, girl-scout-leader Mom was more like June Cleaver,” she finds plenty of semiotic meaning in the adventures of the Beaver and his cohort. Mazza also delivers a few shocks—e.g., finding a photo of her mother in blackface. She shows how the racism of yore survived in her own time (“for all the long-haired blue-jeaned activists of all races and genders, there were enough tie-and-blazer white boys born into a prep-school privilege that maintained their version of meritocracy”), underscoring the idea that life is complex and messy.
Photographic archaeology turns up long-hidden secrets and interesting meditations on the unexplored corners of life.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781956005653
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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by Cris Mazza ; edited by Gina Frangello
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
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
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