A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.
The acclaimed poet plunges into prose with dense literary and cultural criticism accented by personal reflection.
In his nonfiction debut, Reeves, the Whiting Award–winning author of the poetry collections King Me and Best Barbarian, rigorously analyzes works by Black cultural paragons, from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison to Outkast and Michael K. Williams. The author balances this commentary with his own experiences as a Black man in America, including his childhood in the Pentecostal Church and conversations with his young daughter following the killing of George Floyd. “I gropingly understood that her ability to see into people’s questions, to find the question below the question was not only a gift of discernment,” he writes, “but necessary in the struggle for Black folks’ freedom in the United States—seeing what was obscuring freedom and its articulation and getting underneath it, unshackling freedom from fear.” Each essay probes this concept of “underneath,” and each paragraph is packed both emotionally and intellectually, requiring close, conscientious reading to fully grasp the author’s examination of the abundance of irony and contradiction in Black experience. Reeves’ call to resist the salacious and decenter the self is stringent, and nothing is immune from his piercing pen—not even such heralded projects as Hamilton or The 1619 Project. Reeves acknowledges where his critiques may meet opposition, particularly in this “loquacious” age, but he insists on a more honest understanding of history, the complications and complicities on which protests are built, and the method by which tragedy and death become the property of the public imagination. The author’s lyrical prose reflects frenzy and desperation, imbuing a new literary canon with urgency and relevance that is both personal and political. For Reeves, “feeling for the future is a matter of art.” With this text, he inclines toward his ideal of the ecstatic, defiantly daring to build the sort of life—intellectual and free—so easily denied to Black Americans.
A cerebral, ruminative essay collection brimming with insight and vision.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781644452417
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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