Stunning in both the art and the audacity.
Visually arresting and emotionally devastating, this graphic memoir of war and childhood feels like an art book and explodes like a car bomb.
Now based in Paris, Ziadé recounts her childhood in Beirut, where the privileged life of a well-to-do Christian family was shattered by incomprehensible conflict. Unlike the convention of most graphic narratives, this is not a work of panels and captions. Instead, full-page, full-color illustrations are interspersed with occasional pages of text, mostly short bursts of a paragraph or two, using an adult’s command of prose to reflect the perspective of a young child, one who grappled with the complexities of lethal violence that pitted Christians against Muslims, Christians against Christians, Palestinians against Israelis. “I would have loved to learn that the Palestinians were actually the bad guys; it would have been so much easier,” she writes. “At eight I had entered a complex world filled with contradictions and nuances.” Rather than offering a political polemic, Ziadé shows how it felt to find the comforts of consumer culture (often rendered with Warhol-esque brand names) give way to violence that then became the everyday reality. “It’s a casual war. For us, what’s important is doing it with style,” she writes with a child’s open-eyed wonder. She then continues after three pages of drawings (Chivas and cigar, a cheeseburger, corpses at the feet of rifle-toting terrorists): “In Lebanon, the violence takes on legendary status. It’s paramount as the war unfolds—during the first two years everyone is having so much fun: it becomes a ritual for fighters from both sides to drag their prisoners through the streets behind a car until they die. Torture and mutilations are common practice.”
Stunning in both the art and the audacity.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-56656-877-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Interlink Graphic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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