Though this academic study has a stylistic density that a general readership might occasionally find difficult, the...
An illuminating analysis of graphic narrative’s documentary power.
Though many of the artists whose work receives close academic scrutiny here served their apprenticeships in what was once called “comic books,” Chute (English/Univ. of Chicago; Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, 2014, etc.) situates them within the framework of a much longer legacy, of art annotated by words conveying the witness’s horror of war. She quotes art critic Robert Hughes on Goya as “the first modern visual reporter on warfare” and documents the famed artist’s influence on Robert Crumb. Chute then extends that legacy to encompass Joe Sacco, an American Book Award winner and “the contemporary force behind comics journalism, a term he devised,” and Art Spiegelman, with whom she collaborated on MetaMaus (2011). Even those who admire the accomplishments of those artists will likely see them in a new light here, as Chute’s analysis shows how the medium renders time as space, allowing readers to dictate the pace (as documentary film does not). It turns the reader as well as the artist into a witness of the unspeakable in a manner that often transcends polemics and partisanship. The author also introduces readers to the global expansion of the form, drawing connections between American artists and those in Japan and the Middle East. Given the breadth and depth of most of the book, the 10-page coda feels tacked-on, and could be a book in itself, as the Charlie Hebdo murders and other Muslim responses to images they find offensive reinforce the contemporary power and influences of the work—and find Spiegelman and Sacco on opposite sides concerning the freedom to draw such images and the responsibility to publish them.
Though this academic study has a stylistic density that a general readership might occasionally find difficult, the epiphanies are worth the effort.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-50451-6
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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