A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more.
With his latest work of graphic nonfiction, Chuck D uses his art and hip-hop rhymes to show how the U.S. has been held hostage by gun violence and a growing sense of hopelessness.
Unlike the sprawling yet powerful collection Stewdio, which tried to make sense of the chaos of the early period of the Covid-19 pandemic, the author’s latest has a tight focus and engaging structure. The Public Enemy frontman draws impressionistic portraits of news events and then crafts a rhyme to explain it. “At every turn this summer, so much visible hate…Salman Rushdie…is bum rushed and stabbed on stage in Western New York State,” he writes to accompany a poignant sketch of the incident, including the looks of horror from the audience. The bulk of the events Chuck D chronicles are shootings—at a convenience store in California and a shopping mall in Ohio, or the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—and the continuing disastrous effects of climate change, including flooding in Las Vegas and Texas. This is heavy material, but just as Flavor Flav provided enough levity to balance the hard-hitting subject matter of Public Enemy’s albums, Chuck D’s outside interests—basketball, space exploration, and, of course, hip-hop—lighten the mood enough to keep readers moving through this compelling narrative. Few recaps of the summer of 2022 would include drought’s effect on Lake Mead, a critique of Ye’s fashion designs for The Gap, and the importance of the trade of the Utah Jazz’s Donovan Mitchell to the Cleveland Cavaliers. But that’s how Chuck D’s fascinating mind works, and this chronicle of his interests is both brilliant and relatable. He closes with a poignant plea: “Indian summer awaits to cool down the heat and the hate…Protect your fam this fall…The end of hamn.”
A focused, fresh, urgent text filled with pictures worth 1,000 words and rhymes worth thousands more.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781636141527
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Enemy Books/Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© 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.
