In an engaging, distinctly hip-hop style, Chuck D reveals important lessons from the early pandemic years.
The Public Enemy mastermind combines art and hip-hop rhymes to provide his compelling, personal views on the chaotic years between 2020 and 2022.
Though they often feel like diary entries, each installment has an overarching storyline and theme. “There’s a Poison Goin’ On,” written in 2020, began as a chronicle of Public Enemy’s planned social media hoax to kick out rapper Flavor Flav to generate attention to promote its new album. Of course, the pandemic interrupted that plan, but Chuck D, who started out as a graphic design major at Adelphi University, decided to capture his thoughts of those days in words and drawings. His drawings in this installment are mostly impressionistic, immediate reactions to significant events—e.g., the March 12 entry, in which he discusses the NBA deciding to go on hiatus and the cancellation of the annual South by Southwest conference. Because they capture those moments, Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci make multiple appearances along with players in Public Enemy’s world. Trump takes on the prime role in the second installment, “45 Daze of Red Octobot,” which covers the tumultuous, exhausting 2020 presidential campaign between Trump and Joe Biden. Here, the author writes in rhyming couplets, and he adds charming portraits of stars like Questlove and George Clinton as well as less-than-charming likenesses of Trump and members of his administration. Chuck D also shows how much power he can pack in a couplet: “For those non believers denying the climate effect toll / There are clear waterways and melted ice in the arctic North Pole.” The final section, “Datamber Mindpaper: Attack of the Screenagers,” is the most impressive. Also written in couplets, it masterfully combines an indictment of experiencing life through a smartphone with reverent appreciations of the lives of those who didn’t, including such major historical figures as Sidney Poitier and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
In an engaging, distinctly hip-hop style, Chuck D reveals important lessons from the early pandemic years.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781636141008
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Enemy Books/Akashic
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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