The art of cartoonist Zingarelli underscores the tone of the text.
A graphic memoir detailing a pot-dealing scheme that helped finance treatment for those dying from AIDS in the early days before the epidemic even had that name.
Both the title and the format suggest the humorous spirit of irreverence, though the subject is deadly serious. The author and the male nurse who is the protagonist were part of “a small tight-knit outsider community” in New York City at a time when AIDS was mainly a scary rumor and the entire cultural context was different. “So what’s the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel?” one of the group asked Brabner, wife of the late Harvey Pekar, whose deadpan, matter-of-fact sensibility she seems to share. “One is spaghetti. Sometimes Spaghettios. The other is pasta,” she replied. During a period when gay life was marginalized and grant money went elsewhere, a small conspiracy decided to fund itself through “the Colombian Arts Council Grant,” a euphemism for smuggling high-grade marijuana for profits that could subsidize live performances and other art projects. Yet with the emergence of the virus, the profits started to serve a different purpose: to buy and smuggle different drugs, illegal and experimental but available in Mexico. So much was trial and error back then, the testing and the treatment, that much of what they brought back was more short-term benefit than long-term cure. “We sold weed at premium prices to the healthy to support our friends however we could,” writes the author. “And gave it away free to the sick. It helped with the pain and nausea.” The Robin Hood band proved to be the vanguard in a battle that belatedly received mainstream support, not only because it was too widespread to ignore, but “because somebody’s starting to realize this isn’t just a queer disease.” But this is a story of early warning, recognition and action.
The art of cartoonist Zingarelli underscores the tone of the text.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0809035533
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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