An ambitious but somewhat confusing graphic novel that seeks to vindicate Teilhard’s works.
De Terra explores the work and reputation of controversial French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) in this debut graphic novel.
Teilhard was a divisive figure even in his own lifetime. His radical concepts of “hominization” (“the process leading to reflective life in mankind”), “noogenesis” (“the evolution of consciousness”), and “Omega” (“the point at which the universe will ultimately center upon itself and the climax of evolution”) were influential in the New Age movement, but his views on original sin led to his censure by the Vatican. With this graphic novel, de Terra presents the life of Teilhard, who died in 1955 during his de facto exile in the United States, as well as a fictional, posthumous trial at the Vatican in 2009. In the latter, the deceased Teilhard is charged with heresy and violations of canon law by conservatives who feel that his teachings may cause a schism in the church the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Reformation. Teilhard’s defenders are a pair of Jesuit priests named O’Malley and Azcona who are tasked with reconciling his teachings with Catholic orthodoxy. The story uses flashbacks of various moments in Teilhard’s life—including his experiences in World War I and his work studying Peking Man—and of other revolutionary figures in the history of the church to supplement a theological argument of great consequence, not only for the reputation of Teilhard, but also for the direction of the Catholic Church in its third millennium. The author’s father, Helmut de Terra, was a friend of Teilhard’s, and Helmut’s first wife, Rhoda, served as Teilhard’s assistant for the last years of his life. De Terra bases this graphic novel on their accounts as well as on Teilhard’s prolific letters and publications, and he pieces together scenes using direct quotes and invented dialogue. He keeps the biographical sections intriguing, although readers may wish that he had taken more time in the early pages to explain Teilhard’s concepts and what made them controversial. Instead, he merely presents scene after scene of Vatican rebuffs. The trial itself often lags as various ill-defined priests debate points of theology, and readers may never be quite sure about the stakes of the argument at hand. Additionally, the book’s blending of fact and fiction will do a disservice to many readers, as it often will be quite difficult for them to know which events actually happened and which have been invented by the author. De Terra also exaggerates the cultural influence of Teilhard, comparing him to Martin Luther and placing him on the cover of Time magazine and on T-shirts. The book’s art by Villafuerte is perhaps its greatest selling point, as the page layouts and visual pacing do much to make each spread compelling and digestible. The glossy, full-color pages make this a handsome volume even if the content isn’t quite as thrilling as it might appear on first glance.
An ambitious but somewhat confusing graphic novel that seeks to vindicate Teilhard’s works.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-63885-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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