An invaluable window into urban Black America.
Oakland back in the day.
It’s not just San Francisco whose culture has been altered by Big Tech. As the author Ishmael Reed writes in his foreword to this eloquent collection of photos of Oakland in the 1970s, the Bay Area city—where Reed has lived since 1979—has lost much of its Black population: “In 1980, Black residents made up 47 percent of the city’s population. Because of rising housing costs driven by gentrification, in 2024 the percentage of the Black population was reduced to 21.09 percent.” Like neighboring Berkeley, he adds, “Oakland is becoming a white city. But just as we gaze at photos of other historic Black zones that have been razed, Ken Light’s photos will remind future generations that there was a time when Blacks lived among deteriorating Victorians, and no matter how miserable the environment, they had pride and they had friends, made love, had jobs, ran businesses, and made much from little, which has been the strategy of Blacks since the slave ships landed.” The more than 120 black-and-white images by this longtime documentary photographer and filmmaker show everyday scenes in West Oakland—“once considered,” as he writes, “the ‘Harlem of the West’ (along with San Francisco’s Fillmore District).” We see men in fedoras and blazers, their shoes scuffed, posing for portraits. An elderly woman, one of her shoes untied, stands before a heater, her right hand resting gracefully on her chest. There are photos of smiling ironworkers, a man in a bolo operating a shop’s sowing machine, a lone customer at a beauty salon, young couples holding hands, and children on the street hugging each other. The settings are often grim—smashed windows, peeling paint, a tired American flag next to the stenciled words “save childrn need boys scout”—but the photos depict dignified people in humble circumstances.
An invaluable window into urban Black America.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9781597147316
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Heyday
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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