A brilliant blend of graphic and literary narration and a lovely work of art in itself.
Graphic narrative of an often-overlooked episode in the history of American empire.
Seized by the U.S. after the war against Spain and turned into an unwilling economic colony, Puerto Rico spawned a liberation movement after World War II that was populated by intellectuals such as Pedro Albizu Campos, inspired by Gandhian nonviolent resistance as well as by guerrillas less reluctant to use force. Four of the latter traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1954 and attacked the Capitol, wounding five representatives. Visual artist Vasquez Mejias tells this tale in a narrative punctuated by the voices of many of those actors. Counsels one revolutionary to a comrade traveling to the mainland, “My God, even the Library of Congress has a police force plus a new something they call Central Intelligence which goes around killing everybody. Trust no one.” After the short-lived campaign on the mainland, the U.S. promulgated a law that made it illegal to own a Puerto Rican flag or to “speak or write of independence.” The author recounts that his story was slow in the making, largely because he used the traditional medium of woodblock printmaking, about which he reasons, “Nobody is waiting around for this book, so it’s going to take however long it’s going to take.” The woodblock method lends density and gravitas to the work that command attention; each centimeter of each panel is rich in visual detail, inviting readers to linger over the page. One panel is particularly memorable, plainly evoking Francisco Goya’s famed painting The Third of May 1808. Reminiscent of the work of the pioneering graphic artist Lynd Ward, the hand-printed original of this excellent work now resides in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
A brilliant blend of graphic and literary narration and a lovely work of art in itself.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781454952466
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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