An enthusiastic, immersive, entertaining guide for both die-hard Batfans and curious onlookers.
A passionate, precise documentation of Batman’s legacy and enduring popularity among “nerds and normals alike.”
With the same gusto that characterized his debut superhero portrait (Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, 2013), NPR panelist and pop-culture critic Weldon comprehensively charts the nearly 80-year history of Batman through facts, opinions, interviews, visits to Comic-Con, and the obsessions of fans who have helped make the character a household name. Sprawling in scope yet written with breezy flair, the narrative explores Batman’s early beginnings from his comic-book inauguration in 1939, “striking poses” with his billowing cape. A creative collaboration by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, the superhero was an instant hit on the comic circuit and was soon complemented by sidekick Robin, the Boy Wonder, in 1940, creating a male-male partnership Weldon waggishly interprets as “factory-installed with subtext both acknowledged and unspoken, subtext that audiences have always read and interpreted in a host of discrete ways.” Initial decades of successful comics, radio shows, and movie serials also brought unexpected criticism involving alleged misogyny and blatant homoeroticism, both briskly cloaked with the 1956 addition of Batwoman and a myriad of effectively distractive nemeses. As Batman’s popularity became more volatile, writes Weldon, image updates and rebirths attempted to both pacify fans and retain the brand’s appeal and longevity throughout evolutionary cycles in the 1980s, ’90s, and into the present. Details on franchise film production snafus and commentary on Batman’s campy gay appeal add further layers of relatability to the story. Interwoven through the narrative is Weldon’s exploration of how the superhero persona has so captivated the devoted nerd community and why this subculture has defensively and protectively venerated the Dark Knight as their own. Weldon, a thoughtful portraitist who introduces many subtexts to his discussion of superhero adoration, cleverly considers Batman “an inkblot; we see in him what we want to—even if we aren’t ready to admit it to ourselves.”
An enthusiastic, immersive, entertaining guide for both die-hard Batfans and curious onlookers.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5669-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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