A stirring first-person account of holding powerful institutions responsible for abetting slavery.
Battling on behalf of enslaved forebears.
This inspiring memoir features unforgettable dialogue: “We’re going to Columbia, South Carolina, to spend the weekend with the family who enslaved our ancestors!” So Lanier tells her daughters, announcing a remarkable development in a long campaign. Her goal: compel Harvard University to hand over images of her great-great-great grandfather Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, enslaved in the 19th century and treated as “specimens” to be studied. Lanier’s memoir begins in 2010, when she promises her dying mother that she’d chronicle her family’s history. She serendipitously mentions the project to the owner of an ice cream shop near her Connecticut home. Turns out he’s a “genealogical whiz.” With his help, she discovers that Renty and Delia are among seven enslaved people seen in infamous daguerreotypes commissioned in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard professor with repugnant white supremacist theories. Lanier informs Harvard of her lineage but is thwarted by “academic arrogance.” Nevertheless, she persists. A phone call to the family that enslaved her relatives leads to a powerful moment, with Lanier “sitting in a chair hand-carved by” Prince Thompson, another ancestor. She also collaborates with descendants of Agassiz on a public appeal for Harvard to surrender the images, which the school published on a textbook cover and projected on a large screen at an academic conference, while denying similar requests from Lanier. Her 2019 lawsuit didn’t force Harvard to give up the daguerreotypes, but in a decision by Massachusetts’ highest court, justices cited strengths in Lanier’s claim and ruled that she could sue Harvard for emotional distress. This “marked the first time,” Lanier writes, “that a descendant” of enslaved people was “afforded the opportunity to seek accountability from an American institution for the atrocities caused by slavery.”
A stirring first-person account of holding powerful institutions responsible for abetting slavery.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780593727720
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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