Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.
This illustrated peace polemic and lesson in international relations is often educational but only occasionally engaging.
The unusual collaboration teams Roberson, formerly a peace-studies major at Berkeley, with artist Piskor and writer Pekar, who established his reputation through graphic memoir (and whose American Splendor series inspired the well-received film). More recently, Pekar has been telling stories other than his (Ego and Hubris, 2006, etc.), and here he recounts a student research trip taken by Roberson to discover how Macedonia was able to avoid the civil war and ethnic cleansing that had beset so much of what was formerly Yugoslavia. The challenge is to convey the complexities of the situation in graphic form, which amounts to large stretches of Roberson engaging in debate or explanatory dialogue. In the first part, a boyfriend seems there only to serve as a sounding board, allowing Roberson to expound on the history of the Balkans and the peacekeeping efforts in Macedonia. After Roberson decides to go on a quixotic mission to Macedonia for thesis research, the boyfriend drops out of the picture, without explanation. Her travel adventures make for livelier reading, as she becomes frustrated with men hitting on her and a hotel clerk trying to cheat her, while absorbing as much of the culture as she can, forging strong friendships and learning how Macedonia has been able to avoid the fate of its neighbors. The narrative doesn’t whitewash the situation. The Macedonians aren’t necessarily more noble than anyone else, and the ethnic tensions with Albanians threaten the same sort of strife as has torn neighboring Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet the Macedonians have remained committed to war prevention, rather than using the threat of war as a means of sustaining peace. Though there’s a lot of personality in Piskor’s illustrations, a picture plainly isn’t worth a thousand words in this text-heavy work (that ends with an all-text epilogue, presumably written by Roberson).
Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-49899-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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