A gripping combination of haunting photos and plangent stories full of almost unbearably raw humanity.
The faces and voices of people living on the street are revealed in intimate detail in this searing collection of photographs and interviews.
For her fourth volume of literary-pictorial studies of homelessness, den Bok photographed street people in Toronto; Washington, D.C.; and Brisbane, Australia, while her father, Tim, asked questions about their lives and hardships, all in exchange for a $10 payment. Some of their hard-luck narratives have a picaresque specificity: Bill faced eviction because creditors seized his bank account; Ken went bankrupt four times because of his business partners’ drug addictions, a malicious prosecution, and a perfidious woman; Vaughan, an electrician, was homeless by choice because it was cheap and he disliked working. A few people are totally opaque—“Rick seems to be almost completely nonverbal, communicating more with grunts than with words”—while others recall a hazy rut of misfortune, substance abuse, and mental illness. The author’s subjects are articulate about the travails of homelessness, discussing in detail the pitfalls of shelter systems where fighting, theft, and bedbugs are rampant; strategies for surviving Toronto’s frigid winters—find a steam grate to camp over—and the havoc that Covid-19 lockdowns wrought on public bathroom access. (“They wouldn’t even let me use the emergency washrooms” at a hospital, complains Dana. “I was basically treated like an animal.”) Emotional deprivations are just as bitter: Many people talk of their loneliness and estrangement from relatives and of the hole in the heart left by a child they cannot see.
Den Bok’s black-and-white portraits—extreme close-ups that highlight caked dirt and every spike of stubble—are arresting. They include aging King Lears who sport unkempt beards and wild white hair, with one pointing an accusing finger pistol-style at the camera; women with pleading eyes, their creased, spotted faces a road map of wrong turns; and younger men shrouded in blankets and hoodies, half-seen and menacing. Her renditions of her subjects’ conversations seem artless, but in fact she deftly arranges their ramblings into telling evocations of their characters and predicaments. Their soliloquies are sometimes sheer madness—“I fought against Hitler….I fought in Canada because most of it was Chinese….I was a five-star general, a fifteen-star general”—and at other times prosaic accounts of the chaos of mere poverty. (“So, um, I moved to Brampton, and the landlord ended up, ah, screwing over all the tenants, and, ah, he ended up getting a written notice but didn’t tell us tenants, and, ah, we all ended up on the streets on, ah, Christmas.”) Often, they meet in the middle, where people dimly recognize the roles their misfiring behaviors played in their blighted lives. (“I’m, ah…I try to get off the streets,” says Mary Ellen. “I try every day now. Yeah, I…you know, when I was…I don’t know what I’m doing. But mostly in the summer I…I don’t know if it’s some sort of drug I got into….I’m getting into fights every other day.”) Yet as extreme as their circumstances and dysfunctions are, den Bok’s subjects voice yearnings—says Cory of his 13-year-old daughter, “I’d like to see her. I haven’t been having much luck….Oh well! Things are getting better. Things will always get better”—that readers will find heartbreakingly familiar.
A gripping combination of haunting photos and plangent stories full of almost unbearably raw humanity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-1220114752
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Europe Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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