A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.
A multiplicity of being.
The daughter of a Tunisian father and Québécoise mother, Abdelmoumen grew up in Montreal and lived in France between 2005 and 2017 before returning to Canada, where she has continued her career as a writer, scholar, and editor of a literary journal. In this insightful memoir, the first of her books to appear in English, Abdelmoumen reflects on race, ethnicity, cultural appropriation, and her own multiple identities. The relationship between James Baldwin and William Styron is central to these reflections: In France, reading Baldwin for the first time, she was surprised to discover that he and Styron had been lifelong friends. Styron, the grandson of slave owners, and Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, “were both consumed with the problem of racial inequality.” When Styron expressed interest in writing a novel about the rebel slave Nat Turner, Baldwin encouraged the project. The Confessions of Nat Turner won a Pulitzer Prize but incited fierce objections from some prominent Black writers. A white man, they claimed, could only promulgate “white southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary clichés.” Baldwin disagreed, but he, too, later came under censure for not being “Black enough.” Abdelmoumen considers other efforts by white men to portray Black experience: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman, and Abel Meeropol’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” The idea of cultural appropriation, which has become an incendiary issue, seems to Abdelmoumen misguided. “Mistaking an ethnic checklist for a person’s identity is problematic,” she asserts, “as is the ensuing assumption that a person with a certain identity is necessarily knowledgeable about all related topics.” Diversity, she claims, should describe not minority status, but a society that acknowledges the complexity “that comes from all the different facets” of each person’s identity.
A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966269
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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