An insightful, thought-provoking blend of drama and critical theory.
Wong collects plays and essays that argue for the centrality of risk in drama.
Wong argues that risk serves as the fulcrum of tragedy. Characters gamble something, exposing themselves to catastrophe via unlikely but potentially ruinous events, as when Macbeth and his wife decide to kill the king or when Oedipus fails to heed Tiresias’ advice to abandon his search for his father’s murderer. Wong illustrates his theory with three examples of contemporary plays that emphasize risk as the engine of their plot. In Bloom by Gabriel Jason Dean tells the story of an American documentarian who stumbles upon the bacha bazi, or dancing boy, culture while working in Afghanistan. The Value by Nicholas Dunn follows three petty thieves who have just stolen a valuable piece of art and must now come to terms with its real worth. Children of Combs and Watch Chains by Emily McClain involves a husband and wife who, unable to conceive a child, each embark on a secretive “Gift of the Magi”–style plot to make the other a parent, putting their life together in serious jeopardy. Following the plays are six essays by Wong in which he further explores the ways risk functions in ancient Greek tragedies as well as works by Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. Wong extends his risk reading to the realm of the novel, using Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd as his primary example. Wong’s prose is clean and easy to follow even as he wades into textual analysis. He writes that Macbeth “is transformed by a series of low-probability, high-consequence events, in the beginning raised up by chance, and, in the end, cast down by the same power he hoped to harness. Macbeth is the story of how low-probability, high-consequence events encouraged a man to wager all-in.” The three plays are enjoyable in their own rights, particularly McClain’s gripping Children of Combs and Watch Chains, which manages to feel simultaneously classic and fresh. As a whole, the book is both a persuasive argument for Wong’s theory of tragedy and an impressive package in service of his preferred approach to literary criticism.
An insightful, thought-provoking blend of drama and critical theory.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-913510-9
Page Count: 420
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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