A relatively accessible approach to a subject that may still—beg pardon—tax readers without training in economics.
A graphic treatment, with attendant simplifications, of French economist Piketty’s difficult study of capitalism and its failings.
Piketty’s opus would seem an unlikely candidate for translation into what used to be called a comic book. Complete with a fictional family to humanize the dismal-science edge (whence the “novel” part of “graphic novel”), it opens with Piketty’s account of France’s ancien régime and its three estates (the clergy, the nobility, and all the rest), an economy based on deep inequalities. That gulf is reinforced by a proportional or flat tax, which, as one panel puts it, “since the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor,…thus favors the wealthiest group.” Contrast this with progressive taxation, where the “highest incomes are more heavily taxed, for the good of all society,” and you begin to build a bridge. Anathema to free-marketers and libertarians, that system worked in France, the U.S., and other advanced countries until the 1980s and ’90s, when, once those taxes were rolled back, “multiple elites” began to contend on left and right, each in turn building a base that reflects “the return of the educational cleavage,” the left representing educated globalists and the right building on the less educated nationalists. At present the latter seems to be ascendant, and, as a character representing Piketty at the lectern asserts, 1% of the population owns 27% of global wealth, more than twice as much as the poorest half. What’s to be done? Piketty has never been short of policy recommendations, and the graphic treatment captures some of the key ones, including cracking down on taxes evaded (which, if paid, “would pay the annual salary of 34 million nurses”), taxing carbon emissions, instituting “genuine social ownership of capital” by giving employees meaningful shares in their employers’ businesses, and more. It doesn’t quite add up to a novel—it’s really more like Piketty for Dummies.
A relatively accessible approach to a subject that may still—beg pardon—tax readers without training in economics.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781419777059
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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