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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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