An engrossing portrait of a cartooning genius.
Entertaining biography of a poor boy who entered the military as a teenager and became perhaps the greatest war cartoonist of all time, thanks to a couple of GIs named Willie and Joe.
Mauldin (1921–2003) had a hardscrabble childhood in Depression-era New Mexico, avers DePastino (Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, 2003). His destitute parents made no objection when he left home at 14 to live in Phoenix, where he attended high school and tried to support himself by cartooning, a lifelong passion. Sales were rare, so he enlisted in the Arizona National Guard on September 12, 1940. Four days later, the Guard was mobilized as part of the U.S. Army, and a month after that he was drawing a weekly cartoon for the 45th Division News. Aided by generous illustrations, DePastino, who edited a collection of Mauldin’s cartoons (Willie & Joe: The WWII Years, 2008), does a superb job explaining the evolution of his technique. Unlike other bungling comic-strip soldiers from Sad Sack to Beetle Bailey, Willie and Joe were competent infantrymen who hated their job but plugged away. By the time the 45th landed in Italy, Mauldin’s devastatingly funny portrayals of the utter misery of battle, combined with digs at superior officers and noncombatants, had made the cartoons both wildly popular and controversial; his superior officers had to protect him from other superior officers infuriated by his satire. By 1944, national magazines were syndicating his work, and publishers eagerly offered book contracts. Although Mauldin went on to great success as an editorial cartoonist, DePastino argues that his life peaked when he was 24, the year he won his first Pulitzer and the final year of the war. His fiercely obsessive ambition kept him at work day and night, exacting a toll on his stormy personal life.
An engrossing portrait of a cartooning genius.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06183-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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