A thought-provoking analysis that uses art to challenge readers to dig deeper.
Simmons presents a series of critical essays analyzing love and all its forms through a carefully curated selection of art, literature, and pop culture.
In a series of 11 essays that cover different forms of creativity, the author examines the art and pop culture moments that affected him personally. He opens the book with a consideration of Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Treatment, a series of ink drawings that Simmons uses as a basis to discuss the “racist heteropatriarchy” that allows certain (white) people to live without fear (which is “the greatest privilege of all”). The author tackles each chapter from a different critical perspective, focusing on race (via the movie Widows), feminism (via Barbara Kruger’s photo collages), and mental health (via the movie Spencer). But love (in all its forms) largely takes center stage, such as in Simmons’s analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as a “paranoid novel”—complete with an ambiguous ending—that challenges the romantic expectations of the day. The TV show Fleabag is analyzed through a queer lens as the author discusses the protagonist’s tendency to pass “through and between visibility and invisibility.” Simmons also includes some personal anecdotes that highlight his connections to the material. With the author bouncing from one time period and art form to another, some readers may wish for a more streamlined reading experience. Any visual artwork discussed is included alongside its companion essay, making prior knowledge of the pieces unnecessary. Simmons’ refreshing honesty (at one point, he muses about his own suicide attempt: “I think that much of my work in art criticism and history has been spent attempting to be postdiscourse, because suicide is the end of discourse”) and choice to include largely modern works make the book read like a hipper, more socially conscious college textbook. He ultimately demonstrates that contemporary entertainment is worthy of intellectual appraisal by revealing its rich potential for rigorous discourse.
A thought-provoking analysis that uses art to challenge readers to dig deeper.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780271098944
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Penn State Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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