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
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
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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