Chast’s voice and vision make this a singular love letter to a singular city.
The highly regarded New Yorker cartoonist lets readers see the city she loves through her eyes.
As Chast (Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, 2014, etc.) notes early on, this isn’t a guidebook—though it could help Manhattan newcomers navigate the streets and the subways. The narrative is really about how an artist sees and how New York is such a treasure trove for the senses. “Maybe one day you will notice the amazing variety of standpipes,” writes the author on one of the pages illustrated with photos rather than drawings. “The more you notice them…the more you will see.” So it is with the rest of Manhattan, where there is so much to discover; even an artist with a sharp eye and a discerning sensibility can never come close to exhausting the inspiration. Chast explains that she left her native Brooklyn for suburbia for the usual family reasons—an affordable house, better schools, neighborhood safety—but that her love for the city has never diminished. She began this work “as a small booklet I made for my daughter before she left her home in Suburbia to attend college in Manhattan.” The result mixes some of the practical advice she must have offered her daughter with a bit of memoir and plenty of sociocultural observation (though she pays less attention to the city’s people than its resources and attractions). Chast makes development as an artist and her experience in the city seem inseparable. “I’ve always preferred cities to Nature,” she writes. “I am interested in the person-made. I like to watch and eavesdrop on people. And I really like DENSITY OF VISUAL INFORMATION.” Such density—and the details of visual information—consistently informs her work. The author also underscores the point that even Central Park, that leafy oasis that comprises 6 percent of the island, is actually man-made: “It contains lots of Nature, but is no more ‘natural’ than an arrangement of flowers from your neighborhood florist.”
Chast’s voice and vision make this a singular love letter to a singular city.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-321-1
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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