Darkly fascinating and artfully spirited, the author’s cautionary reawakening is a potent rumination on death and what lies...
A longtime Buddhist philosopher’s near-death experience proves life-altering, enlightening, and horrifying.
Bercholz, the founder of Shambhala Publications, offers a grandly produced graphic memoir chronicling his “ineffable” descent into the volcanic depths of what he perceived as a retributive “Buddhist underworld.” Believing he has experienced death twice, the author details his early life in San Francisco, where he swapped a budding career in political science for book publishing and a “complete Buddhist education” under the tutelage of meditation master Trungpa Rinpoche. On a pilgrimage to India, Bercholz contracted typhus fever, and he recalls following a bright light after hovering painlessly above his hospitalized body. His second deathly encounter arrived three decades later when, in his 60s, he developed a severe post-surgical blood infection and was thrust into a swirling netherworld of volcanic hellfire stacked with writhing bodies and populated by a host of “Hell-beings,” some helpful, some frightening. Bercholz creates character-driven vignettes symbolizing and personifying the “qualities of the myriad denizens of hell” as he’d viewed them personally and from corresponding Buddhist cosmology. These creative allegories tell how the tortured souls became trapped by their unfortunate choices during life. With colorful prose, the author charts his descent into a netherworld guided by a benevolent, sublime, gender-fluid being he dubs the “Buddha of Hell.” The book is strikingly illustrated by celebrated Tibetan artist Thaye, who collaborated with Bercholz in surmounting the narrative’s greatest challenge in “devising a visual language inspired by my cryptic utterances without trying to depict them in the literal sense.” Eventually, the author was miraculously pulled back to consciousness, but he remains forever changed by his surreal travels. A work of mixed genres, Bercholz’s fiery expedition, while extraordinarily frightening, seems to direct readers toward living a good, clean life in the here and now, since the conditions of one’s post-mortem future may very well depend on it.
Darkly fascinating and artfully spirited, the author’s cautionary reawakening is a potent rumination on death and what lies beyond.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61180-142-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Shambhala
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book...
Memory comes alive in this compelling amalgam of drawing, narrative and archival photography.
A prolific illustrator of children’s books and an artist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and other magazines, the author made a major leap into memoir with Mendel’s Daughter (2006), his debut in the genre. Where that well-reviewed volume focused on the Holocaust from the perspective of his mother, this follow-up continues the story of Lemelman’s family through the author’s Brooklyn boyhood. Though there’s an innocence to his tales of working at his father’s candy store—squashing cockroaches, playing pranks and exploring the worlds of the streets (“There was always something going on at the Market…Life was everywhere”)—this was not an idyllic childhood, nor is it rendered sentimentally. After immigrating to America following World War II, Lemelman’s parents turned family life into an ongoing battle as they balanced the nonstop demands of a neighborhood shop with the challenges of raising two rambunctious sons. “Deh Tateh” had served in the Soviet army after surviving the Holocaust, complained incessantly about life in America and barely hid his alcoholism. “Der Mameh” refused to back down to her husband, insisted she was more of a help in the store than he thought she was and left her son feeling deprived. The author and his brother Bernard became both allies and antagonists within the family dynamic. It all comes to vivid life through the artist’s drawing and through a narrative that conjures the voices of his dead parents to complement the author’s perspective, which retains a childlike spirit. The family chronicle unfolds against the backdrop of a tumultuous era—the assassination of a president, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and, perhaps most significant for the family, the changing demographics of a neighborhood that initially brought new waves of customers but saw a rise of anti-Semitism that drove so many families and businesses from what had long been their home.
“Life is the biggest bargain. You get it for free,” reads one of the Yiddish sayings that introduce the chapters, in a book that is both a celebration and an affirmation of life.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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