In a diverse, impassioned book, these quick responders illustrate the impact of the pandemic with work of lasting value.
Extraordinary circumstances inspire a range of extraordinary artistic response, as this anthology attests.
As the pandemic lengthened and deepened, the response across the comics community intensified—first online, where many went viral, a turn of phrase that tinged a few shades darker in light of the virus. This volume launches the Graphic Mundi imprint from Penn State University Press. In the preface, Boileau, the publisher for the new imprint, writes that these comics “are documentary, memoiristic, meditative, lyrical, fantastic, and speculative, offering a view onto the countless ways the COVID-19 pandemic has changed lives.” All of the entries share one defining quality: immediacy of the moment, a response to the crisis from within it. A few are day-by-day diaries, including the opening narrative, by Jason Chatfield, about testing positive, in which he writes about his inability to meet his writing goal of trying “to finish a sentence.” Hatiye Garip’s “Corona Diary” is brief and wordless, achieving eloquence through a variety of shifting shapes and images. In “COVID Hardball,” Rich Johnson and Eli Neugeboren lay out a series of baseball cards of significant figures of the pandemic era, including New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern; Singapore’s Halimah Yacob; Donald Trump, who “repeatedly held large campaign rallies without requiring masking”; and Anthony Fauci, the “M.V.P. (Most Valuable Physician).” The collection also includes superheroes battling evil monsters and entries on the pandemic’s effects on Natives and other marginalized populations. Of course, there is the tragedy of death but also the inspiring poetry of trying to come to terms with what it all means. Boileau sums it up well: “Strange, perhaps, for these emotions to resonate so clearly in a medium that people often assume is either directed toward children or there for our amusement. But comics have a history of tackling weighty and mature subjects—and doing it well.” Add this book to that history.
In a diverse, impassioned book, these quick responders illustrate the impact of the pandemic with work of lasting value.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-271-09014-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Graphic Mundi
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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