Stunning design combines with an edgy, inspirational life story; let us see more.
Marrus’ debut chronicles her artistic development through allegorical paintings and anecdotes of living life to the fullest.
In her bid “to become the lead character of my own story,” Marrus moved to New York City for a comic book apprenticeship, where she worked in a small animation studio, doing background inking for Valiant and serving as creative director for Gor graphic novels. All along, she struggled with loneliness and insecurity, resenting the “Hammer of Financial Rationality,” aka the fact that artists need day jobs. She spent two years becoming a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, but that was her last brush with the real world. Finally, she boldly decided to wear an “avatar”—an “idealized fantasy” of herself (thus dropping her first name)—and earn a living through art by taking pieces on the road to sell at Renaissance festivals, where she also does body painting. Her memoir cleverly intersperses diary entries, dreams, poems and photographs with humorous yarns, such as trying to toilet-train kittens and tan a deer hide in her tiny apartment. A self-deprecating tone still makes room for sincere words of encouragement: “Happiness comes from living life now, being aware of what you have that brings you joy and peace, and focusing on that.” Most pages also feature a sample of the author’s striking, symbolic artwork, sketches and full-color reproductions, many of chimeras and hybrid creatures, with motifs of eyes, lips, hands, feathers, deer, dogs, cats, carousels or circuses, as well as vaginal and phallic imagery. Her titles for chapters (“Hey, I Needed the Money”) and paintings (“Chainpigs”) are equally intriguing. The most arresting piece, “When the Crotch Rules the Mind in the Quoilyn Garden of Lust, Narrated,” is a Bosch-like nightmare of sex and madness. These more provocative aspects of Marrus’ work—including photographs of her seminude modeling and descriptions of experimentation with drugs and S&M—may alienate some readers. As Marrus admits, “traditional galleries haven’t known what to do with me,” for her works are “visual metaphors for things that are difficult to put into words.”
Stunning design combines with an edgy, inspirational life story; let us see more.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Kissena Park Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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