Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.
This illustrated peace polemic and lesson in international relations is often educational but only occasionally engaging.
The unusual collaboration teams Roberson, formerly a peace-studies major at Berkeley, with artist Piskor and writer Pekar, who established his reputation through graphic memoir (and whose American Splendor series inspired the well-received film). More recently, Pekar has been telling stories other than his (Ego and Hubris, 2006, etc.), and here he recounts a student research trip taken by Roberson to discover how Macedonia was able to avoid the civil war and ethnic cleansing that had beset so much of what was formerly Yugoslavia. The challenge is to convey the complexities of the situation in graphic form, which amounts to large stretches of Roberson engaging in debate or explanatory dialogue. In the first part, a boyfriend seems there only to serve as a sounding board, allowing Roberson to expound on the history of the Balkans and the peacekeeping efforts in Macedonia. After Roberson decides to go on a quixotic mission to Macedonia for thesis research, the boyfriend drops out of the picture, without explanation. Her travel adventures make for livelier reading, as she becomes frustrated with men hitting on her and a hotel clerk trying to cheat her, while absorbing as much of the culture as she can, forging strong friendships and learning how Macedonia has been able to avoid the fate of its neighbors. The narrative doesn’t whitewash the situation. The Macedonians aren’t necessarily more noble than anyone else, and the ethnic tensions with Albanians threaten the same sort of strife as has torn neighboring Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet the Macedonians have remained committed to war prevention, rather than using the threat of war as a means of sustaining peace. Though there’s a lot of personality in Piskor’s illustrations, a picture plainly isn’t worth a thousand words in this text-heavy work (that ends with an all-text epilogue, presumably written by Roberson).
Reads more often like a lecture than a graphic novel.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-49899-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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