An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.
A raw, contemplative account of a death-row inmate’s journey toward redemption through faith, family, and rap.
This unusual memoir, a collaboration between Braxton and Katz, who teaches a course on “Music and Incarceration” at the University of North Carolina, captures wisdom accrued through more than 25 years of incarceration. Braxton contacted Katz in 2019, seeking guidance on how to better record the raps he had been writing. Katz notes that Braxton “accepts his guilt” for three murders he committed as a young man, acknowledging, “I do not want to minimize his crimes or ignore his victims.” He asserts that the detail and originality of Braxton’s writing (many lyrics appear in the book) speak to the potential for personal growth and cultural value despite these crimes, and he casts himself as part of “a self-fashioned ‘Alim team,’ working to share Braxton’s powerful words and music.” Braxton identifies himself as “a prisoner, a writer, and a rapper on North Carolina’s Death Row,” aspiring to both dramatize his rejection of the nihilistic violence of “street” machismo (“I was nineteen years old and fascinated with the idea of being a gangster”) and call attention to the ugly reality of wrongfully convicted individuals sentenced to death. “Since I’ve been here, I’ve seen 35 people executed and 7 people exonerated because they were innocent,” he wrote in one of his letters. In percussive, short chapters, Braxton vividly presents his own background, including documentation of bleak decades behind bars and feelings of guilt and torment, which dedication to Islam helped him address. “There’s no getting around the darkness in this book,” writes Katz, but there is also “joy, hope, and love.” Though the narrative structure is sometimes too disjointed, Braxton’s story is worth discussing.
An unvarnished look at a life reclaimed deep within the edifice of mass incarceration.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781469678702
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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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