An intriguing collection of layered, frolicsome drawings.
Innocent (The Great Messiah, 2015) displays some of his teenage work in this book of sketches and word art.
Torn from the pages of his teen notebooks (sometimes with the binder holes still visible along the margins), these images provide a glimpse into the passions and fixations of the visual artist. The centrality of written language is especially evident: words appear in nearly every piece, and about half of the works contain no images other than words. One reads: “Unable to move. / Incapable de bouger. / Incapaz de moverse.” Another simply, “Lee Harvey Oswald / John Wilkes Booth,” with check marks next to each name. The African-American experience is central to the work. “Word black lingers everytime I accomplish something,” says one. Another: “Descendant of Cotton Pickers.” A black and red drawing of a grotesque, stylized face features the caption “Origin of Negros.” Innocent’s own artistic ambitions are also a recurring subject. One page contains a dialogue exchange between Innocent and someone named Nick, in which the former predicts, “I know I’m going to be a famous artist and I think I’m going to die young.” Simple drawings of figures and objects in red or black pencil, sometimes shaded in with a childish dash of color, typify the more figurative offerings. In terms of pure visual power, this is not the most striking collection of art one could find. Even so, Innocent has a poet’s gift for precision, and the way he literally writes his words (with some letters rendered backward, or phrases crossed out and reworded) highlight the text and the thought process behind it in captivating ways. The book certainly captures the angst-ridden teen aesthetic, with references to algebra, muscle groupings, fluoride, and various philosophers suggesting an artist doodling his way through his high school classes, snatching interesting ideas and images from the air. The use of lists and Scrabble-like word junctions furthers Innocent’s playful deconstruction of language. One might not give these works a second glance if they were found crumpled beneath a desk, but collected here these dashed-off musings take on a potent and thought-provoking quality.
An intriguing collection of layered, frolicsome drawings.Pub Date: June 19, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Powerhouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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