A serviceable place holder while we await more from this talented artist.
A New Yorker cartoonist gathers more than 500 of her pieces from that magazine, other publications, and Instagram.
Though she has been writing and drawing for years, Finck experienced a breakthrough of sorts with her impressively multilayered graphic memoir, Passing for Human (2018). Here, the author provides one or two simple sketches or lists per page, ranging across such sections as “Love and Dating,” “Gender Politics and Politics in General,” “Animals,” “Art & Myth-Making,” and “Time, Space, and How to Navigate Them.” As with many collections of cartoons from illustrators, comedians, or other artists, the quality here varies widely. Further culling would have been welcome (especially in the “Notes to Self” section, which many readers may skim); some of the cartoons feel rushed or even unfinished. However, when she hits, Finck is incisive in her observations of modern life—e.g., two nearly identical sketches of someone typing on their phone; one caption says “Work,” and the other says “Fun.” While Finck is certainly in line with Roz Chast when it comes to expressing anxiety and neurosis (“Can everyone else stop doing anything while I figure out what’s paralyzing me?”) in an approachable, even appealing manner, Finck is also sharp in her exposures of hypocrisy and double standards, especially when it comes to gender relations—e.g., an old man and old woman standing side by side, and the caption under the woman reads, “Too old to been seen as sexual,” while under the man, “Too old to be blamed for hitting on everyone.” Or a woman saying to a man, “I don’t want your last name. Can I have your sense of entitlement instead?” As a two-color paperback, the book should serve well as a holiday gift for fans of Chast, New Yorker cartoons, and droll humor delivered in bite-size chunks.
A serviceable place holder while we await more from this talented artist.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984801-51-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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