A headbanging romp of a beautifully designed book.
Metal mania.
It’s been 50 years since Harris, armed with his cheap bass guitar, founded what would become one of the best-known bands of the new wave of British heavy metal, one that still packs venues all over the world. The rockers celebrate their anniversary in this visual history book, and it’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive one. Bookended by a foreword by Harris and a “backword” by singer Dickinson, the first pages point to how well preserved the Iron Maiden archive is, with photographs of a young Harris alongside some of his diary entries, fliers for shows, newspaper clippings, and images of the young band in action. The book tracks the band’s rise, from its appearance on the influential Metal for Muthas compilation to its worldwide breakthrough in 1982 with the now-legendary album The Number of the Beast, its first record to feature Dickinson on vocals. Each album and tour gets its own section, with admirable attention paid to cover boy Eddie, the band’s nightmare-inducing, zombielike mascot, and the artist who created him, Derek Riggs. The band photographs by Ross Halfin and official band photographer John McMurtrie are excellent, but there’s much more: images of the band’s gear, galleries of concert T-shirts, and pictures of “Ed Force One,” the tour plane that Dickinson piloted. (The singer contains multitudes.) The text functions as an approachable and informative history of the band, highlighting its frequent personnel changes and its often literary lyrics, which at times drew from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, G.K. Chesterton, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This is an astonishingly well-documented and lovingly curated look at a band that changed rock forever. Its fans will love it, but the appeal isn’t limited to them.
A headbanging romp of a beautifully designed book.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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