Readers who love the cartoons will appreciate knowing more about the cartoonists.
Incisive interviews with a dozen cartoonists whose work highlights the esteemed magazine.
Through merchandising, anthologies and websites, the New Yorker’s cartoons enjoy a higher visibility than ever, but the stories behind the artists and their work remain little known by comparison. Even some of the names here may not by familiar to regular readers of the magazine, though their work will be. “The New Yorker operates as a loose-knit chorus of individual voices composing a loosely defined (cosmopolitan, sophisticated, liberal, bourgeois) aesthetic,” writes veteran journalist Gehr (The Phish Book, 1998). “[Former editor William] Shawn sought artists with distinct styles and somewhat broader socioeconomic focuses.” Among the insights gleaned by the author are just how radical and influential Roz Chast has been, how unpopular Shawn’s successor, Robert Gottlieb, was with so many of the artists, how deflating it can be for even the magazine’s most prolific artists to experience such a high rate of rejection, and how difficult it can be to define just what a New Yorker cartoon is. Among those spotlighted are former cartoon editor Lee Lorenz, his successor, Robert Mankoff, and stars such as Chast, George Booth, Gahan Wilson and Edward Koren. Yet the most fascinating profile here is of the lesser-known Arnie Levin, the heavily tattooed beatnik-biker who seems most at odds with what one expects a New Yorker cartoonist to be. There’s too much formulaic similarity among the profiles—each opens with an anecdote, followed by a childhood and family biography, the pathway to the magazine and some inside-baseball references that go beyond inspirations and technique to preferences in paper, drawing implements and the like. But each individual profile sustains interest because each has an interesting subject. As Gehr writes of Gahan Wilson, “It’s a terrifying world out there, his art seems to say, and this is how I’ve learned to cope with it.”
Readers who love the cartoons will appreciate knowing more about the cartoonists.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0544114456
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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