A delightfully sprightly and pun-laden history.
The history of a much-maligned punctuation mark.
In her first book, Hazrat notes that many writers have warned against using the exclamation point because it “provides cheap emphasis.” As the author notes, it “grabs our attention, whether we want it to or not,“and it exists in nearly every language. Early civilizations developed a system of signs—comma, colon, period, other punctuation marks came later—to help us understand the anatomy of sentences. In 1399, a Florentine lawyer and politician combined the dot and apostrophe, but its use was inconsistent. The “earliest mentions” of the exclamation point first appeared in English in 1551, and Ben Jonson’s 1765 Dictionary definition increased its influence. After a discussion of the ups and downs of tonal punctuation over time and grammar’s role in punctuation, Hazrat turns to Anton Chekhov’s story “The Exclamation Point.” She gleefully notes that in 45 of Elmore Leonard’s novels, there are only 49 of them. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has 2,131, and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities 2,400! Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea contains only one. Hazrat offers up a lot of punctuation trivia as well as information about the other marks, including the “infamous interrobang,” which is “not really a new mark at all, but rather two old ones squeezed together.” Hazrat also looks at Richard Artschwager’s sculpture Exclamation Point; he called it the “prince of punctuation.” Theodor Adorno likened the mark to a “soundless clashing of cymbals.” Hazrat notes the preponderance of the exclamation point in comic books, poster art, and political advertising. The author notes with chagrin Donald Trump’s “proclivity for the frenetic use of !” and follows its role in the digital world. “Among all glyphs,” she writes, the bold mark is “most available, and most versatile, the most recognisable and most ironic.” In the end, its job is to “attend to admiration” and “point out wonder.”
A delightfully sprightly and pun-laden history.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781567927870
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
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
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
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