Even if other posthumous work follows, it likely won’t be any richer than this.
This posthumous publication reflects the seminal graphic memoirist at his edgy best.
From the grave, the pugnacious Pekar (Huntington, West Virginia “On the Fly,” 2011) is still issuing challenges and picking fights. But the handsome hardback publication and the masterful illustration by Waldman (Megillat Esther, 2006) confer a respectful legitimacy that shows how far the genre Pekar helped spawn has advanced since his early comic-book narratives. The tone is quintessential Pekar, pulling no punches, while the focus extends beyond the purely personal to the history of the Jewish people and the formation and essence of Israel. Both of his parents were ardent Zionists, but the author was not. The story begins with a visit by the narrator and the artist to a huge used bookstore in his native Cleveland and ends with them doing more library research. In between, it encompasses centuries and continents against a backdrop of Jewish history (with appropriate flourishes and framing from the artist as the tale moves through Roman and Muslim periods), interspersed with the tale of Pekar’s experiences in Hebrew school, his initiation into the leftist politics of the 1960s, his disillusionment with Israel as an oppressor, and his empathy with Arabs who were seen as the enemy. “Israelis mark this as a war of independence,” he says of the triumph he initially celebrated. “Palestinians call it the great catastrophe.” Pekar deepens the discussion through conversations with the illustrator, who lived for a couple of years in Israel (where Pekar had once attempted to move, but he received no encouragement from the Israeli consulate). Proudly Jewish but increasingly skeptical of Israel’s moral authority, Pekar makes no claim to expertise on Middle Eastern relations: “What do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz,” he admits. “I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.”
Even if other posthumous work follows, it likely won’t be any richer than this.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9482-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.
A tour of calculus from the polymath whose illustrated guides have illuminated a wide range of subjects, from genetics and sex to the environment and the universe.
This time out, unfortunately, Muse cartoonist Gonick’s (The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, 2009, etc.) presentation is labored, the cartoons are primarily decorative and the course is tough. To begin with, calculus requires four years of high-school math, which the author reprises in the first 50 pages. For many readers this will be a slog through algebra, trigonometry, exponentials, function theory, etc. While most texts map equations onto lines or curves on a standard x-y axis, Gonick introduces parallel lines with arrows connecting an x value on one line to its f(x) value on the parallel line. This approach is particularly unhelpful when you want to visualize, say, minute changes of position (on the y axis) over time (on the x axis). Nor does the author discuss fundamental concepts like continuity or maxima and minima until well into the chapters on the derivative and differential calculus. While he does highlight fundamental theorems and classic rules, Gonick devotes too much space to how-to manipulations like how to differentiate inverse functions. The narrative improves when the author introduces the concept of the integral as the sum of skinny rectangles under a curve, and Gonick provides many helpful, practical examples of how calculus is used.
This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-168909-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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