Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.
Art and verse celebrating extreme cosmological phenomena.
Nobel Prize winner Thorne has been a notable theoretical physicist, author, and media scientist a la Carl Sagan for the past 50 years. Award-winning artist Halloran’s work features images that straddle the worlds of art and science. The result of nearly 20 years of collaboration, this is a lavish, vivid book dominated by Halloran’s dazzling, more or less representational paintings, accompanied by Thorne’s commentary, often in free verse. Although it lacks consistent rhyme and meter, free verse remains verbal music. No discerning reader—nor Thorne himself—would claim to find poetic mastery in his text, which might better be described as prose written with irregular margins. Nonetheless, the author’s descriptions serve their purpose, which is not to provide lessons in popular science but to explore spectacularly weird astrophysical phenomena and illustrate how they might affect a person experiencing them. Readers who skim the text in favor of the illustrations will not regret the experience, but they would do well to slow down later in the text, when Thorne converts to prose, offering a fine history of relativistic phenomena since Einstein pointed them out, along with a sketchy explanation of the science. Since Einstein, writes the author, “we physicists have studied the prediction of [his] laws in depth and have gradually learned that the universe has a rich warped side: its big bang birth, black holes, gravitational waves, and possibly wormholes, time machines, cosmic strings and naked singularities, and almost certainly some huge surprises.” Readers seeking a deeper understanding should consult Thorne’s 1994 book, Black Holes & Time Warps, in which he makes a sincere attempt to explain difficult concepts such as warped space and flexible time as well as bizarre cosmological wonders that definitely exist (black holes, gravity waves) and those that may not (worm holes, time travel).
Beautiful art in the service of cutting-edge astrophysics.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781631498541
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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