Stunning in both the art and the audacity.
Visually arresting and emotionally devastating, this graphic memoir of war and childhood feels like an art book and explodes like a car bomb.
Now based in Paris, Ziadé recounts her childhood in Beirut, where the privileged life of a well-to-do Christian family was shattered by incomprehensible conflict. Unlike the convention of most graphic narratives, this is not a work of panels and captions. Instead, full-page, full-color illustrations are interspersed with occasional pages of text, mostly short bursts of a paragraph or two, using an adult’s command of prose to reflect the perspective of a young child, one who grappled with the complexities of lethal violence that pitted Christians against Muslims, Christians against Christians, Palestinians against Israelis. “I would have loved to learn that the Palestinians were actually the bad guys; it would have been so much easier,” she writes. “At eight I had entered a complex world filled with contradictions and nuances.” Rather than offering a political polemic, Ziadé shows how it felt to find the comforts of consumer culture (often rendered with Warhol-esque brand names) give way to violence that then became the everyday reality. “It’s a casual war. For us, what’s important is doing it with style,” she writes with a child’s open-eyed wonder. She then continues after three pages of drawings (Chivas and cigar, a cheeseburger, corpses at the feet of rifle-toting terrorists): “In Lebanon, the violence takes on legendary status. It’s paramount as the war unfolds—during the first two years everyone is having so much fun: it becomes a ritual for fighters from both sides to drag their prisoners through the streets behind a car until they die. Torture and mutilations are common practice.”
Stunning in both the art and the audacity.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56656-877-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Interlink Graphic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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