Urbane, penetrating cultural analysis.
Intellectually vigorous essays on Black culture.
McCarthy, who teaches in the English and African American Studies departments at Harvard, makes an impressive book debut with a collection of 20 deftly crafted essays, some previously published in journals such as n+1, the Nation, and the Point, where he is an editor. McCarthy’s range is broad, encompassing writers Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Walter Benjamin; artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, and French urban documentarian JR; singer/songwriter D’Angelo and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman; trap music; Frank B. Wilderson III and Afropessimism; and French society. Addressed in part “to the younger generations, struggling right now to find their footing in a deeply troubled world,” McCarthy’s writings on art, politics, and Black experience contribute to what he sees as “a deep yearning in our society not only for sensate, intelligent, moral reasoning, but also for the prophetic witness unique to the black radical tradition.” In the title essay, the author responds to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” which incited much debate after it appeared in the Atlantic in 2014. Reparation for racial injustice, McCarthy argues, is “a moral rather than a material debt.” Although he acknowledges that Coates is justified in focusing on the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks, McCarthy takes the pragmatic view that reforms in education, sentencing, policing, and community empowerment are more achievable—and more significant. “The way to do justice to an oppressed minority is to allow it to flourish,” he writes, rather than to quantify, monetize, or value humans in dollar amounts. “Reparations should be about bending the social good once again toward freedom and the good life.” Having grown up in Paris, where he moved with his parents, both journalists, when he was 8, the author bears witness to “the Paris of color, of difference” that marginalizes Black immigrants. The tragic terrorist attacks at Bataclan in 2015, writes McCarthy, communicated “a desperate will to power” by those who believe verbal expression impossible.
Urbane, penetrating cultural analysis.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-648-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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