Beautifully drawn, contentious, and word-heavy, offering everything about early Mormonism that anyone might like to know.
A graphic novelist takes a deep dive into the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“I was born the eighth of nine children into an LDS family,” writes Van Sciver in the author’s note, going on to describe how his “faith evaporated” even as he still maintained interest in the church since childhood. “I spent years immersed in an independent study on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” he writes. “I traveled to historic sites all over the country and read books, went to church, listened to hymns, and wrote and drew like the Devil was chasing me.” This graphic history/biography is intensive with dialogue and text, but it’s particularly eloquent on the wordless pages, which allow Van Sciver’s artistry to shine through. The author ably captures the world in which Joseph Smith and his followers made their way west through the wilderness, facing persecution and charges of perfidy at every turn. (Van Sciver takes Smith and his followers to Missouri, ending well before they continued to Utah after his death.) Though the book will likely displease strict LDS followers, the author insists that he seeks to tell the story “as straightforwardly as I can and to let readers draw their own conclusions.” The book suggests that the young Smith was something of a con man, perhaps from a family of swindlers, well before he allegedly experienced heavenly visions. Van Sciver renders those visions expertly, the illustrations cast in a ghostly blue and white, providing a pleasing contrast with the otherwise full-color narrative. As the author shows, Smith was duplicitous in wooing his wife and keeping from her the sexual dalliances that led to a doctrine of polygamy. Furthermore, his bank cheated depositors, and his deceptions were spread by muckraking newspapers. One page proclaims him, “Swindler, Charlatan, Crook, Fraud,” as if the universe itself were passing judgment.
Beautifully drawn, contentious, and word-heavy, offering everything about early Mormonism that anyone might like to know.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4965-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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