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FLOATING IN A MOST PECULIAR WAY

What happens to hippies who sell out 20 years down the pike? They become the subject of books like this witty debut about aging boomers’ gradual accommodation to reality. Janelle and Tom may not have been the original flower children, but they were certainly on the scene. Married in the late 1960s, both were involved in various antiwar and liberation movements, and for a few weeks they even sheltered two members of a Weathermen-like underground on the lam for killing a Boston cop during a bank robbery. Later on, they wandered across the country, and Tom, while working at a university, eventually learned to program computers. When Janelle gave birth to their son Zak, Tom built a cabin for them in Valdosta, Georgia, where he found work as a computer designer. Life is going along happily for the pair when they are confronted with a ghost from their past in the person of Michael “Angel” Martelli. An old friend from movement days, Angel calls out of the blue asking if he can drop by for a chat; he’s now a lawyer, and it turns out that he’s concerned about Katherine Powers, one of the bank robbers Tom and Janelle sheltered 30 years back. Katherine has decided to turn herself in, and Angel (who arranged for her to stay with Tom and Janelle) is afraid that his name might come up in the case and hurt his career. Janelle promises to say nothing, but inwardly she begins to wonder about the value of all they once believed in. She’s also increasingly distraught over Zak’s imminent departure for college. Has she lost her ideals? Or has she simply put those ideals into private life? Perhaps “the personal is political,” as they used to say, though in a way that Janelle could not have guessed until now. Somewhat rambling and obvious, but told with a fresh voice and infused with a likable spirit: even Young Republicans might be taken in.

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-9657639-3-5

Page Count: 230

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999

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HEART OF DARKNESS

Gorgeous and troubling.

Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.

As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.

Gorgeous and troubling.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019

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A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.

Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.

Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.

Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.

Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7

Page Count: 144

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013

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