Solid journalism that takes readers into cheerless, contested places they probably would not wish to see for themselves. An...
Canadian journalist Di Cintio (Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran, 2006, etc.) leads a whirlwind tour of the world, looking at the unlikely places where the human mania for erecting barriers has shown itself.
Take the Western Sahara, for example, all rippling sand dunes and the occasional oasis, formerly known as the Spanish Sahara. When Francisco Franco was dying, he sent up a casual middle finger to his anti-colonial foes by dividing the territory between Morocco and Mauritania, countries that promptly set about squabbling over it. The result? Thanks to endless hard work, a wall now extends into the desert that is “longer than the Great Wall of China”—though it’s not likely to last as long. The wall may make its Moroccan builders feel more secure, but people have a habit of getting over and around such structures, as Di Cintio notes when considering the walls that have gone up on the U.S.–Mexico border and between Israel and the Palestinian settlements. The walls are everywhere: In the last Spanish settlements on the African continent, Ceuta and Melilla, walls proclaim that here stands Europe, while the wall that divides India from Pakistan is permeable precisely because the people who live there aren’t as concerned with being separated as the politicians in Karachi and New Delhi are. Even in Canada, Di Cintio observes, which boasts the world’s longest unarmed border, obstacles divide the wealthy from the poor of Montreal: a structure known as “the Fence of Shame and the Wall of Shame—the same term used for the berm in the Western Sahara.”
Solid journalism that takes readers into cheerless, contested places they probably would not wish to see for themselves. An eye-opener.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59376-542-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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