A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.
A set of portraits from an artist who helped to define an era of celebrity.
Photographer Edie Baskin’s distinctive hand-tinted images helped to set the aesthetically adventurous tone of the cultural juggernaut Saturday Night Live from the program’s first episode in 1975. She would go on to photograph the show’s hosts and musical guests for the next 25 years (the images would typically appear as “bumpers” between ad breaks), and her instantly recognizable shots of Steve Martin (perhaps her signature muse) or Elliott Gould or Sissy Spacek deliver memory-evoking kicks. Baskin’s images for SNL may bring Andy Warhol’s celebrity Polaroid snapshots to mind, but their effects are markedly different. While Warhol’s often harsh, cold, and flat portraits distance the viewer from the subjects, Baskin’s vibrant enhancements (she used a variety of techniques to add pigment to her black-and-white shots) reveal quirky, human qualities—the viewer leans in, their relationship with the subject deepened. The brilliant and tragic Richard Pryor, for example, pictured wearing a psychedelic pink sweater, vibrates against a stark black background, his eyes full of the pain of the world. Some of Baskin’s pieces suggest well-known paintings: The photographer grants Shelley Duvall’s elongated features the languorous elegance of a Modigliani odalisque; a delicate image of Jodie Foster with straw-colored hair and sky-blue eyes seems plucked from an Andrew Wyeth canvas. At the other end of the spectrum, Rodney Dangerfield pulses with the inhuman energy and anarchic hilarity of a Warner Bros. cartoon. The cumulative effect of the collection is one of piercing nostalgia for a vanished era of show business that now seems impossibly human-scaled. Baskin’s subjects, as ecstatically celebrated here, were not like the machine-tooled, media-trained, TikTok-ready stars of the moment; they could be lumpy, awkward, weird, unpolished, real. The miracle of Baskin’s technique was that her alterations to the objective documentary “truth” of her photographs only made the work feel more authentic, more revealing of the subjects’ essential natures—a captivating magic trick that works again and again.
A sumptuous and revelatory collection of 20th-century iconography.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781788843430
Page Count: 216
Publisher: ACC Art Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
