Whether or not Pekar has exhausted the storytelling possibilities of his own life, fans will appreciate this change of pace.
The latest from the renowned graphic memoirist offers a fascinating character study of a character who isn’t Harvey Pekar.
Though Cleveland’s Pekar (American Splendor, 2004, etc.) has mined his own life for stories that have taken him from the comic-book pages to late-night TV to the big screen, the writer here turns the spotlight on another character. Meet Michael Malice, whose issues with authority, ambition and political correctness will strike a familiar chord with Pekar’s readers. Through the illustrations of Gary Dumm, the reader enters the world of this Brooklyn-raised son of Russian immigrants, a young man who quickly realizes that the American dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. From grade school through college and into the workforce (where he finds his comfort level as a temp), he always seems to be something of a misfit or an outcast, feeling that he’s so much brighter than those who would attempt to teach him or judge him. As the title of the book suggests, Michael might be a little too smart for his own good—quick to reject conventional wisdom and common sense in favor of an intellectual rigidity that puts him in a league with the likes of Ayn Rand. Pekar and Dumm invite the reader to identify with Malice, telling his story through his eyes in his words, yet the course of his life puts his vaunted intelligence at odds with the realities of the world around him. The narrative has all the deadpan realism of Pekar’s autobiographical work, and even has some sort of happy—or at least optimistic—ending that the writer has never previously permitted himself.
Whether or not Pekar has exhausted the storytelling possibilities of his own life, fans will appreciate this change of pace.Pub Date: March 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-47939-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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.
