by John O’Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 18, 2020
A provocative confrontation with U.S. exceptionalism.
An acclaimed artist challenges American mythmaking.
O’Connor, a retired professor of art from the University of Florida, offers readers a series of 60 digitally produced works of art that aim to shake up Americans’ preconceptions about their nation’s history. The book follows a predictable pattern, with each piece of art accompanied by a one-page narrative that provides historical context and commentary. All of the pieces are “fake slates” that feature a stylized chalkboard that nostalgically recalls elementary school classrooms. Each slate juxtaposes comforting notions about America’s past with harsh historical realities. Beginning with a critique of sanitized histories of Christopher Columbus and moving chronologically, the book provides accounts of Pilgrims—whose story, the author says, is “cruel, murderous, and genocidal”—and of “war criminals” hired by American presidents from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush. A particularly poignant artwork replaces America’s national motto with “Greed is Good” and combines symbols of American wealth with a golden calf. Another work juxtaposes words and pictures associated with World War II American heroism (such as valour and justice) with images of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. Most of the “fake slates” are engaging and provocative and reflect the skilled hand of a veteran artist. However, the accompanying narratives can be heavy-handed, putting into words what might have been better left unspoken to allow the art to have a more visceral impact. Most topics fit into a general theme of tackling American icons, but a small number go on bizarre tangents, alleging UFO coverups in Roswell, New Mexico, and plagiarism in the works of Maya Angelou and the Rev. Martin Luther King. (In a characteristically jarring move, the author opens the book with a quote by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels about telling a lie so often that it becomes truth.) Although not all readers may agree with the author’s pessimistic view of America, his art forces people of all ideologies to confront some hypocrisies of history.
A provocative confrontation with U.S. exceptionalism.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66321-095-1
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
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
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