A worthy contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War.
A draft resister of yore recounts the tumultuous days of the Vietnam War.
“We were the last American generation,” writes Greenbaum, “in which lives and careers were interrupted and placed on hold, redirected, overturned, damaged, or even ended” due to the “whims” of government officials committed to winning a war. Today military service is voluntary, but until 1973, it was luck of the draw. From 1960 to 1973, by the government statisticians’ reckoning, nearly 2.5 million American men joined the military, about three-quarters of them draftees. There were also some 209,000 draft resisters—evaders, runaways, all lumped into the category “draft dodgers,” with another 100,000 deserters added into the mix—of whom only a very small number were ever prosecuted. Greenbaum looked up old friends and queried strangers alike to present stories, many of which were only reluctantly shared. Indeed, as one doctor began to speak, his wife urged him to be silent, fearful to this day that “some nut will be at our door trying to hurt us.” Some stories emphasize the inarguable fact that the war was fought by minorities and the poor, two groups that lacked the student deferments and sometimes-questionable medical exemptions. Most successful conscientious objectors were white, while the most famous of them, Muhammad Ali, was “a significant example of the legal machinations, religious and racial prejudice, and Selective Service bumbling that sincere conscientious objectors had to endure.” Many resisters left the country, never to return, and found that authorities abroad, from French detectives to Canadian customs officials, were sympathetic to their cause. In the end, Greenbaum notes, while it took courage to fight, it also took courage to “say no to the Vietnam War machine, to a government and its systems that were geared to use you.”
A worthy contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: March 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780700636303
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kansas
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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