An uneven but often intriguing look at a modern creative artist.
Lund presents a collection of essays and other short writings.
This compilation kicks off with a review of a 2015 exhibit at Los Angeles’ California Science Center that featured the Dead Sea Scrolls. The author describes the scrolls’ presence as “ghostly,” and the tour as brief, but notes that the experience was still worth the trip. A bit later, the work presents a no-frills description of a Rose Bowl football game (“Eventually, Georgia defeated Oklahoma in double overtime, (54-48)”) and then offers original poetry, which is sometimes startling (“Breakfast / Sits / Like a pine cone / In my ass”), and other times grandiose (“My greatness will be realized despite my mortal cage!”). Not long after an academic essay on Geoffrey Chaucer comes the hardiest fare in the collection—a journal. In brief entries, the author describes his creation of independent comic books over the course of a few years. The journal will provide plenty of tips to the uninitiated, such as the importance of having promotional items at the Alternative Pres Expo in San Francisco. The collection’s final pages offer a short, oddly violent screenplay, featuring characters with names such as “Rock-Head” and “Knuckles Tony”; at one point, a young, female character is described as “Very pretty, but not astonishing.” This book, as its subtitle indicates, encompasses a multitude of odds and ends, which function more as a portrait of their creator than any kind of cohesive narrative. Readers don’t get very many details about what it’s like to live in LA, enjoy the occasional museum visit, and try to make it in the comic book business. However, altogether, the book offers an intimate and inviting précis of the artist himself. That said, certain portions are unhelpfully obtuse; for example, regarding a display of William Shakespeare’s folios, the author vaguely and confusingly observes that “Genius pokes holes in hubris and casts light while many people struggle with their endeavors in the arts.”
An uneven but often intriguing look at a modern creative artist.Pub Date: April 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64426-553-6
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Rosedog Books
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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