A scholarly but engrossing meditation that challenges what we see in portraits—and in our mirrors.
A set of essays reconsidering how we think about faces through the lens of films, books, emoji, and more.
Serpell is one of our brightest new fiction writers and essayists. Her 2019 novel, The Old Drift, which won both the Windham-Campbell Prize and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, addresses colonialism with rare intelligence and sweep while her work for the New York Review of Books makes her a compelling voice on race and Africa in culture. This short book, based on her research, isn’t the easiest place to get to know her, but it’s rich with thoughtful considerations of the human face and how we look at it. In the case of Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, Serpell is intrigued at how his deformities inspire a host of metaphors, not all involving ugliness and horror. In Hannah Crafts, the cryptic author of the slave narrative The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Serpell finds a trove of subversions of expectations of black and white “faces,” from the narrator’s light skin and author’s plagiarism onward. In a concluding chapter, the author reconsiders the emoji’s role in culture and how the lack of common interpretations opens up the images to playful and nuanced interpretations. That plus two more essays on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis on faces. Serpell writes that she wishes to “shatter” conventional interpretations of the face, but she isn’t moved to assemble a new one from the pieces. Her discussion of fetishes drifts into academic jargon, and she is, by her own admission, overly obsessed with the role of a mop in Hitchcock’s classic. But in recasting the Elephant Man’s face as a thing of beauty (or at least one with its own aesthetics) and studying digital avatars for multitudes of expression (including blackface), she’s broken ground for further commentary.
A scholarly but engrossing meditation that challenges what we see in portraits—and in our mirrors.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945492-43-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sleek, vital history that effectively shows how, “from the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the...
A concise, alternate history of the United States “about how people across the hemisphere wove together antislavery, anticolonial, pro-freedom, and pro-working-class movements against tremendous obstacles.”
In the latest in the publisher’s ReVisioning American History series, Ortiz (History/Univ. of Florida; Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, 2005, etc.) examines U.S. history through the lens of African-American and Latinx activists. Much of the American history taught in schools is limited to white America, leaving out the impact of non-European immigrants and indigenous peoples. The author corrects that error in a thorough look at the debt of gratitude we owe to the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican War of Independence, and the Cuban War of Independence, all struggles that helped lead to social democracy. Ortiz shows the history of the workers for what it really was: a fatal intertwining of slavery, racial capitalism, and imperialism. He states that the American Revolution began as a war of independence and became a war to preserve slavery. Thus, slavery is the foundation of American prosperity. With the end of slavery, imperialist America exported segregation laws and labor discrimination abroad. As we moved into Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, we stole their land for American corporations and used the Army to enforce draconian labor laws. This continued in the South and in California. The rise of agriculture could not have succeeded without cheap labor. Mexican workers were often preferred because, if they demanded rights, they could just be deported. Convict labor worked even better. The author points out the only way success has been gained is by organizing; a great example was the “Day without Immigrants” in 2006. Of course, as Ortiz rightly notes, much more work is necessary, especially since Jim Crow and Juan Crow are resurging as each political gain is met with “legal” countermeasures.
A sleek, vital history that effectively shows how, “from the outset, inequality was enforced with the whip, the gun, and the United States Constitution.”Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1310-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
A rewarding journey through the career of one of the pioneers of minimalist music.
Artists in various disciplines share their thoughts on and with one of the most celebrated contemporary composers.
In this collection of transcripts from chats, most of them conducted via Zoom in 2020 and 2021, figures including sculptor Richard Serra, Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington, and composer Julia Wolfe share insights into minimalist composer Reich’s works, including It’s Gonna Rain, Electric Counterpoint, and Double Sextet, the last of which garnered Reich the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music. While most conversations focus primarily on Reich (b. 1936), the book is strongest when there’s a genuine dialogue between composers, as when Reich and Stephen Sondheim discuss similarities in their work during a 2015 moderated chat (“we share a fondness for the same harmonic structures,” Sondheim says) or when Nico Muhly describes the ways in which Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and a motet by William Byrd influenced his No Uncertain Terms. Conversations in which little is learned of the other participant’s output lack the depth of other exchanges. Even there, however, the shoptalk is a thrill to read. Reich fans will develop a greater appreciation of his music, with sections on his mastery of the use of tape loops, his innovations in phase music, the rehearsals for Drumming, and the use of strings in parallel with recorded voices in Different Trains. Those new to Reich will discover an eclectic composer who has drawn from sources as disparate as electronic devices made at Bell Labs in the 1960s and the music of 12th-century French composer Pérotin to create the hypnotic Four Organs. Conversations with conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and David Robertson are particularly rich thanks to their enthusiasm and expansiveness and the depth of technical detail—especially when Robertson speaks about conducting Reich’s Tehillim, The Desert Music, and other pieces and Thomas discusses the near-riot Reich’s Four Organscaused at Carnegie Hall in 1973.
A rewarding journey through the career of one of the pioneers of minimalist music.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-335-42572-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
