An absorbing story with a risky, genre-defying approach.
The life of a real-life forgotten entertainer and artist is recovered in MacBride’s biographical novel.
Merton Clive Cook (1868-1931), known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as The Great Clivette, was a true Renaissance man who traveled around the world. He narrates this faux memoir, in which he describes himself as the companion of Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Buffalo Bill, and Mark Twain; indeed, he may have been the basis of “the Mysterious Stranger” in an unpublished Twain novel of the same name. Clivette worked at various intervals as a magician, tightrope walker, juggler, mime, lecturer, and painter. MacBride, a scholar of the late 1800s and early 1900s, found that Clivette was “strangely connected to everything in the entertainment world” around the turn of the century. Drawing on his collaboration with the Clivette family estate—which possesses a treasure trove of records, notes, clippings, and letters pertaining to its illustrious ancestor—MacBride offers the first book-length exploration of the artist’s life. As the author of more than a dozen books, from scholarly monographs and essays to SF novels and children’s books, MacBride has a history of experimenting with genres. This fictionalized work may alienate readers looking for a more traditional biography, and many may take exception with the narrator’s usage of problematic terms such as Indian. However, it effectively allows MacBride to bring Clivette’s larger-than-life persona, in all its self-aggrandizing hyperbole, to the fore. It’s also well balanced by a final chapter (“Fact from Fiction”) that parses out the accuracy of Clivette’s more “outlandish claims”; for example, Clivette’s meeting Twain is unconfirmed, but MacBride makes the case that their interaction was “likely.” Although the work lacks citations, the book does include a 12-page bibliography, and MacBride (who has a doctorate in 19th-century American literature) is careful to highlight gaps in the historical record. The book’s emphasis on engaging readers, in the impassioned, compelling spirit of Clivette himself, is reflected in its inclusion of more than 50 images, including posters and other ephemera, photos, and a gallery of Clivette’s art.
An absorbing story with a risky, genre-defying approach.Pub Date: June 8, 2023
ISBN: 9798987939314
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Salty Books Publishing Company, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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