A lively, inspirational tale that will point young readers toward art, music, and resistance of their own.
A sometimes bitter and brittle, always heartfelt memoir of growing up as a Black punk rocker in rural California.
“Apple Valley, California, like most of small town America, sucks.” So writes Spooner in this probing graphic memoir. The high desert of the title is a place where “you can count on dirt, desolation, and despair.” As the author reveals, you can also count on the anomie that leads some kids to drugs, some to suicide, some to neo-Nazism. His White mother, “raising a black son on her own,” coped as best she could to protect the young man. There was plenty of harm to face, with an absence of role models and plenty of reasons to keep one’s head down to avoid the inevitable high school bullying. Spooner found solace in punk rock and its accouterments—mohawk haircut, combat boots, etc.—all of which only drew more attention to him. There weren’t many role models in punk, either, for a young man of color, even though bands like Black Flag had “two tone” and minority members—all good reason to found a punk band of his own. Spooner is a discerning student of his own past and the movement he joined. As he notes, punk was steeped in politics, especially of the intersectional sort that rejected racism, sexism, homophobia, and Reagan-era retrograde culture. “Punk positioned me to listen,” he writes. A sojourn in New York to visit his father, an award-winning professional bodybuilder from St. Lucia, occasioned an encounter with even more political punks, to say nothing of Joey Ramone, and helped him launch a number of zines as well as a record label. “This is what punk inspired,” he writes at the close of his eloquent latter-day rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City.
A lively, inspirational tale that will point young readers toward art, music, and resistance of their own.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-65911-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
An impassioned message of rage and hope.
The author of Persepolis returns with a collection about burgeoning activism in Iran.
In September 2022, the beating and death of Mahsa Jina Amini, an Iranian student arrested for not wearing her headscarf properly, incited a solidarity movement among women and men that spread around the world. To publicize and bear witness to this major uprising, Satrapi has gathered stories, cartoons, and essays from more than 20 artists, activists, journalists, and academics. The author has two aims: “to explain what’s going on in Iran, to decipher events in all their complexity and nuance for a non-Iranian readership, and to help you understand them as fully as possible”; and “to remind Iranians that they are not alone.” Setting the movement in context, Iranian American historian Abbas Milani offers an overview of the political upheavals and revolutions that have led to the current misogynist, repressive regime and the “resolute defiance” that has emerged in protest. As each contributor attests, life under a wrathful dictatorship is consistently frightening and dangerous: “The Islamic Republic ensures its own survival by murdering people. During the successive demonstrations” over Amini’s murder, “several hundred people were killed in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of protesters. Young people were forced to confess under torture.” Women are especially vulnerable. Since November 2022, young students in schools across Iran have been poisoned by toxic gas as part of an attempt to force girls’ schools to close. Protecting the regime falls to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary organization that answers directly to Khomeini, the Supreme Leader, and for the past four decades has carried out a reign of terror. This collection pays homage to victims and celebrates the dreams of Iran’s determined activists. Other contributors include Joanne Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Paco Roca, and Mana Neyestani.
An impassioned message of rage and hope.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781644214053
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
A sharp compendium of dreamy visions that could only have come from the iconic cartoonist’s sleeping mind.
The renowned cartoonist taps into Freud, Jung, and Kabbalah to discuss what happens when the head hits the pillow.
Chast, famed New Yorker cartoonist and winner of the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? makes it clear that while your own dreams may be inherently interesting, listening to other’ dreams is markedly not. Thankfully, the author’s thumbnail depictions of dreams that span a cross section of her bedside dream journal bring just enough humor and wit for readers to be charmed instantly. “This book is dedicated to the Dream District of our brains,” writes the author, “that weird and uncolonized area where anything can happen, from the sublime to the mundane to the ridiculous to the off-the-charts bats.” Familiar classics—“alone at a party,” “teeth falling out”—sit alongside the bizarre and hilarious—e.g., “too many birds not enough cages.” Even actor Wallace Shawn, son of former New Yorker editor William Shawn, makes an appearance: “He and I were walking down Main Street in a town in Connecticut and I needed to point something out to him: ‘Look, It’s a Broccoli Patch!’ ” From “Recurring Dreams” to “Nightmares” to “Dream Fragments or Ones That Got Away,” Chast explores beyond the first blush of the strange and personal in dreams. She writes, “here’s what’s interesting: dreams come out of my brain…as I sleep, I am creating them…so why, as they unfold, am I always so surprised?!??” The author reaches for answers beyond Freud and Jung to a wider range of insights from Kabbalah, Aristotle, neuroscientists, molecular biologists, and more. Illustrations and visual storytelling weave together a broad range of content on dreams that offers insight while never feeling burdensome or overly analytical. Easy on the eyes and witty, this book will have readers reaching for their own dream journals.
A sharp compendium of dreamy visions that could only have come from the iconic cartoonist’s sleeping mind.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781620403228
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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