Provocative pieces that detonate many notions of identity.
A collection of incisive essays about hyphenated identity.
These essays, writes Khakpour, “are a testament to the greatest and worst experience of my life: being a spokesperson for my people, a role I never dreamed of and never asked for. This is my pigeonhole, and this is my legacy….These pieces are my bridge, and they are my cave.” The author, who has also published two novels and a memoir about her battle with Lyme disease and chronic misdiagnosis, is clearly—and understandably—uncomfortable with the mantle of “Miss Literary Iranian America,” as she sardonically refers to it. In the penultimate essay, “How To Write Iranian America, or The Last Essay,” she traces the arc of her career, from fledgling writer who initially refused to focus on identity to New York Times contributor whose prolific output depends on her ability to “write an essay on absolutely anything for these people, provided that it’s about Iranian America—which it will be.” Consequently, in the Times and elsewhere, Khakpour has churned her way through “Islamic Revolution Barbie,” reality TV with a Persian twist, the Islamic New Year, and other topics to appease the American appetite for the Iranian “other.” In the final, titular piece, which she notes was never intended for publication, the author writes about how, “like a worm,” the essay “grew inside me until it could not be contained.” It’s identity confusion, about which stories we chose to tell about ourselves, and about being brown in a country more blindingly white under Donald Trump. “This is an essay that many of my own people would tell me to go kill myself for,” writes the author, “because I deny the whiteness they claim….I want to remind those who can claim whiteness that they are a very small group.”
Provocative pieces that detonate many notions of identity.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56471-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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