Another solid addition to the series in which the author brings the seriousness his subject deserves.
An analysis that goes deeper than most into the metaphysical vision of comics pioneer Stan Lee (1922-2018).
In the latest volume in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, Leibovitz necessarily focuses on Lee’s essential Jewishness and indicates that his life and legacy deserve academic scrutiny. As an author and commentator who works closely with many Jewish media outlets (he is a senior editor at Tablet) and who has previously published on Jewish subjects, he has the right credentials for the subject. Most importantly, however, Leibovitz brings to the project a deep love for—and knowledge of—the comic-book world that Lee created and how that world impacted popular culture and vice versa. With Marvel Studios now dominating the movie industry, one is less likely to underestimate the popular reach of Spider-Man or the Avengers, but Leibovitz argues that most are missing the big picture, that even serious scholarly attention has been “focusing on history and sociology but rarely on philosophy and theology.” The author’s analysis is not exactly an introduction or a primer, and it will most satisfy those who are already well versed in the Marvel universe, the Talmud, and the cultural and political upheavals that so profoundly impacted the thematic progression of Lee’s empire. Leibovitz wants readers to recognize the cultural parallels between comic books and rock ’n’ roll, to see Lee as a kindred spirit with “another gnomic Jewish artist, Bob Dylan,” and to see how “his comic books, like Dylan’s songs, have become vast cultural canvasses onto which anyone interested in the art form can paint his or her own interpretations, an ongoing dialogue with the artist that mirrors the ancient Talmudic logic of constant conversation and disputation.” The author also touches on Lee’s gift for self-mythologizing and the charges that, as a collaborator, he has taken more credit than is his due.
Another solid addition to the series in which the author brings the seriousness his subject deserves.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23034-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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