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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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