A scholarly but engrossing meditation that challenges what we see in portraits—and in our mirrors.
A set of essays reconsidering how we think about faces through the lens of films, books, emoji, and more.
Serpell is one of our brightest new fiction writers and essayists. Her 2019 novel, The Old Drift, which won both the Windham-Campbell Prize and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, addresses colonialism with rare intelligence and sweep while her work for the New York Review of Books makes her a compelling voice on race and Africa in culture. This short book, based on her research, isn’t the easiest place to get to know her, but it’s rich with thoughtful considerations of the human face and how we look at it. In the case of Joseph Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, Serpell is intrigued at how his deformities inspire a host of metaphors, not all involving ugliness and horror. In Hannah Crafts, the cryptic author of the slave narrative The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Serpell finds a trove of subversions of expectations of black and white “faces,” from the narrator’s light skin and author’s plagiarism onward. In a concluding chapter, the author reconsiders the emoji’s role in culture and how the lack of common interpretations opens up the images to playful and nuanced interpretations. That plus two more essays on Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man doesn’t add up to a cohesive thesis on faces. Serpell writes that she wishes to “shatter” conventional interpretations of the face, but she isn’t moved to assemble a new one from the pieces. Her discussion of fetishes drifts into academic jargon, and she is, by her own admission, overly obsessed with the role of a mop in Hitchcock’s classic. But in recasting the Elephant Man’s face as a thing of beauty (or at least one with its own aesthetics) and studying digital avatars for multitudes of expression (including blackface), she’s broken ground for further commentary.
A scholarly but engrossing meditation that challenges what we see in portraits—and in our mirrors.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945492-43-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
