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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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