A discerning analysis.
The afterlife of a song.
In a thoughtful contribution to the publisher’s Singles series, which examines the personal and social significance of a discrete musical track, Smith, a professor of French, focuses on Brel’s famous “Ne me quitte pas,” written and performed in 1959. As a 16-year-old, hearing Simone’s cover of the song, Smith was captivated. “I credit this song,” she writes, “as one of the reasons I, a Black American woman from a monolingual, English-speaking family, studied French in college. And it was Nina who made sure I kept with it when the whitewashed curriculum of my textbooks suggested French was a language only for white people.” Melding memoir, literary analysis, and cultural criticism, Smith creates a meditation on translation, adaptation, and appropriation, exploring how Brel’s “ode to romantic despair” has traveled across “geographies, genres, and generations,” performed in almost 30 languages, including Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian. Smith discusses Simone’s choice in making the song one of her signature pieces, her decision to sing it in French, even though she spoke the language imperfectly, and the connection the piece had to her identity as a Black American. Like Simone, the British performer Shirley Bassey, also Black, was drawn to the piece, which she sang in poet Rod McKuen’s English translation. McKuen’s version, which included musical changes, afforded the piece a larger audience but altered its tenor, leading Smith to ask whether it is better described “as a derivation, a transcreation, or an adaptation.” Incorporating literary and cultural theory, Smith considers how race and gender have factored into the performance and reception of the piece, as well as how its meaning has been changed by renditions in film, theater, drag performance, and even a Cirque du Soleil show.
A discerning analysis.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781478028253
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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PERSPECTIVES
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