by Ward Sutton ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 2005
Passionate to a fault, in a way that’s inspiring even as it becomes furiously repetitive.
The noted cartoonist’s first collection renders modern politics as lamentable spectacle.
Modern political cartoonists come in two varieties: The gray-haired dinosaurs doing carefully mild bipartisan humor for the big dailies get what meager glory there is; the rest are mired in the netherworld of free alternative weeklies, hopefully away from the escort ads. Sutton belongs to the latter group; his profanely funny work is seen most often in the Village Voice, occasionally in publications as far flung as the New York Times. While this roundup is far from essential reading, there’s enough good material here to warm the heart of any good blue-state resident. Sutton tends to work from roughly a half-dozen topics: the spinelessness of Democrats, the warmongering of the Bush White House, the cowardice of the mainstream media, the utter and depraved evil of Dick Cheney. His tone of unrelieved and exasperated anger is free from the irony of cozier satirists like Jon Stewart. The clownish artwork and constant, juvenile nastiness can be cloying after a while, as evidence by the one-panel of Donald Rumsfeld masturbating to war footage, a joke that might have seemed funny to someone putting together a college newspaper at four in the morning. Nothing here achieves the satiric insight of, say, Tom Tomorrow, one of Sutton’s closest peers. That said, one strip, “Visitors,” achieves a sublime greatness through its horrific portrait of a man desperately waving from a smoking window of the World Trade Center. Wondering if anyone can see him, he has visions of everyone from a soldier (“I can see you. Your death will motivate me to kill others”), to a lawyer (“I’ll fight to get you and your survivors a sizable, respectable settlement”), to Osama bin Laden (“I can see you. And I’m laughing”). It also stands out simply because it’s one of the only pieces here to deviate from the usual carping.
Passionate to a fault, in a way that’s inspiring even as it becomes furiously repetitive.Pub Date: June 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58322-677-X
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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