A well-crafted visual depiction of the troubling contents of the Mueller Report.
The Mueller Report gets the comic-book treatment in this graphic novel.
The much-anticipated Mueller Report—officially titled Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election and named for Robert Mueller, the special counsel who conducted the probe—was finally released to the public on April 18, 2019. For those whose eyelids get heavy at the very idea of the two-volume, 448-page redacted report, Slate (You Can Do a Graphic Novel, 2018, etc.) offers this condensed, visually stimulating version: a graphic novel of excerpts accompanied by illustrations of the relevant events. Readers can learn all about Russian spies’ posing as Donald Trump supporters on Facebook; the infamous meeting between the Trump campaign and Russian agents in Trump Tower; Trump’s asking for United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation; and Trump’s many colorful tweets. Along the way, the author delivers cartoonish depictions of the major players, often placing their own words—as recorded in the report—into speech bubbles. Even with Slate’s attempts to streamline the report, the book makes for some technical reading. “The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States,” reads the first sentence, accompanied by smirking portraits of Vladimir Putin and Russian businessman Yevgeniy Prigozhin. The author’s drawings are simple and quite endearing—if not always flattering to those they portray—and she organizes the narrative in a way that is easy to follow. It’s unclear who would be interested in reading Mueller’s findings at this time given that new Trump scandals have already displaced these older ones in the public’s mind. Still, for those who have not perused the work and need to get the highlights, Slate’s version goes down far easier than the original report. One could imagine it proving a useful tool in the future for readers who wish to understand the particulars of the Russia investigation when it is no longer general knowledge. But for those who just lived through it, the volume is less entertaining than it is distressing, disturbing, and occasionally infuriating.
A well-crafted visual depiction of the troubling contents of the Mueller Report.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-937258-11-8
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Richard Minsky
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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