An entertaining, brilliantly shot look at a Texas high school tradition.
Schultz explores the culture of Texas homecoming mums in this debut book of photography and reportage.
Across the country, high school girls often wear chrysanthemum corsages to their yearly homecoming football games. In Texas, however—where everything is bigger—the homecoming mum has morphed into an elaborated affair featuring as many as twenty artificial mums personalized with ribbons, beads, feathers, trinkets, messages, and the like. Schultz, who attended high school in Florida, first encountered the phenomenon of Texas homecoming mums after moving to the Lone Star State as an adult. She was immediately fascinated: “Is a mum just a mum or is a mum a metaphor?” she wonders early in the book. “Is the thing greater than the sum of its parts, much like the person who wears it, or the state in which it thrives, or the society in which it stands?” With this book, Schultz sets out to explore—through stories and photographs—the culture of mums: how the tradition originated, how it has changed over the years, and what it means for the schools, students, parents, and communities who participate. It’s a tale rooted in a particularly Texan love of maximalism, but one that also tells a larger story of the human need for ritual and pageantry. Schultz’s spirited prose vividly captures the colors and textures of the mums and their wearers, as when the author gets to try one on and strut around: “When you’re enveloped in a mum of this size, there’s no direction to go but forward. As I found my footing to steer all three of my dimensions, the mum audibly cheered me on, because woven into it was a waterfall of sleigh bells and cowbells. With my every step, twist, and gesture, the bells involuntarily created a manic and discordant melody.” The many eye-catching black-and-white photographs are as instrumental as the text in communicating the soul of mum culture. Both seasoned Texas home-comers and readers completely unfamiliar with the tradition will be equally charmed by this beguiling quirk of Americana.
An entertaining, brilliantly shot look at a Texas high school tradition.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781639885657
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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