An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.
A collection of web comics with a feline accent about life during the Covid-19 era.
Denver author/illustrator Acevedo (Steampunk Banditos, 2018, etc.) finds humor in the pandemic in 300 single-panel cartoons that show varied creatures—cats, mice, aliens, and fictional characters, such as Big Bird and the Cat in the Hat—reacting to its challenges. Introduced by the award-winning journalist and NPR contributor Peter Heller, the book begins with one of the best of its six sections: “Broken Mirror” finds its nonhuman subjects reacting to drone deliveries, Zoom meetings, social distancing, and out-of-control quarantine hair, and more. In a “Community Stress Test,” Acevedo adeptly sends up multitasking by depicting a mother cat feeding her kittens while texting on her phone. Many other entries have a similarly light or whimsical tone. In one, a cat peers out from a toilet-paper tower. Another tweaks Covid-related weight gains with an image of a cat trying to button its pants, which are now much too small. Other cartoons are more macabre, one features a cat getting its temperature taken at the Pearly Gates with a Plexiglas shield present. As with most such collections, this one seems designed to be kept on a coffee table and picked up when you need a smile, and some entries work better than others. Inspired in part by the work of B. Kliban and Gary Larson, the black-and-white, pen-and-pencil illustrations are generally clear and to the point but occasionally hard to interpret: What are we to make of a drawing of an Aztec god buying food from a taco truck? But Acevedo, who once drew award-winning editorial cartoons for a Texas newspaper, doesn’t shy away from political disagreements and civil unrest related to the pandemic. Nor does he ignore the daily struggle of sheltering in place in these cartoons, which first appeared in his daily social media posts. In short, this book has something for everyone—or at least everyone who believes that, even in a pandemic, cats can be funny.
An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-647-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
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
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