A wonderfully fun book showing that the art of having a good time has not been lost.
An entertaining look at a vibrant, “interactive, interpretive, and immersive” pop-culture community.
There was a time when cosplay—dressing up in costumes based on characters from movies, TV shows, comic books, or video games—was seen as a marginal, geeky pastime. In the past couple decades, however, it has gone mainstream, turning into an avenue for enjoyment and escape for vast numbers of people. Liptak, a journalist and proud cosplayer, walks through the history, noting that Jules Verne once held a party where the guests could dress as a character from one of his novels. Modern cosplay began with the first Star Wars movie. Liptak was enthralled with the uniforms of the stormtroopers; when he wanted to make his own, he found out that many other people did, too. This was the beginning of the 501st Legion, the largest Star Wars cosplay group, with more than 15,000 members. The association conducts charity fundraisers and performs other good works, but most of the members like to compare tips to bring their costumes ever closer to the source material. Of course, the internet has allowed cosplay to flourish, and there is a remarkable number of conventions and gatherings around the world, celebrating everything from Star Trek to sexual role play. Liptak notes that the nature of cosplay events has changed in the past few years, with a higher turnover of characters and more anime heroes. The technology for making costumes has also changed, with 3-D printers adding a new dimension. The moviemaking studios were initially wary of cosplaying, pointing to the potential for copyright infringement, but they came to accept and embrace it (as long as it doesn’t affect their merchandise profits). Some cosplayers have turned their hobby into a business, but most just want to enjoy the ride. Liptak renders all of these community-building adventures with aplomb.
A wonderfully fun book showing that the art of having a good time has not been lost.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5582-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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