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THE CARTOON GUIDE TO CALCULUS

This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.

A tour of calculus from the polymath whose illustrated guides have illuminated a wide range of subjects, from genetics and sex to the environment and the universe.

This time out, unfortunately, Muse cartoonist Gonick’s (The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2, 2009, etc.) presentation is labored, the cartoons are primarily decorative and the course is tough. To begin with, calculus requires four years of high-school math, which the author reprises in the first 50 pages. For many readers this will be a slog through algebra, trigonometry, exponentials, function theory, etc. While most texts map equations onto lines or curves on a standard x-y axis, Gonick introduces parallel lines with arrows connecting an x value on one line to its f(x) value on the parallel line. This approach is particularly unhelpful when you want to visualize, say, minute changes of position (on the y axis) over time (on the x axis). Nor does the author discuss fundamental concepts like continuity or maxima and minima until well into the chapters on the derivative and differential calculus. While he does highlight fundamental theorems and classic rules, Gonick devotes too much space to how-to manipulations like how to differentiate inverse functions. The narrative improves when the author introduces the concept of the integral as the sum of skinny rectangles under a curve, and Gonick provides many helpful, practical examples of how calculus is used.

This is no idiot’s guide to math, but it could be useful as a supplement to a standard course in calculus.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-168909-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011

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MY FRIEND DAHMER

An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.

A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.

If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”

An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.

Pub Date: March 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Abrams ComicArts

Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012

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TWO CENTS PLAIN

MY BROOKLYN BOYHOOD

“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...

Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.

A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.

“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010

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