I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Author: Rigoberta Menchu
Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu powerfully describes the social and political struggles of her Guatemalan Indian community.
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In the Shadow of No Towers
Author: Art Spiegelman
For Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers, his first new book of comics since the groundbreaking Maus, is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey—with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit—the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review - David Hajdu
In the Shadow of No Towers looks like a repudiation of the undergrounds and their progeny, a rejection of their now generic graphic crudity in favor of an approach that is simultaneously contemporary and antique. Spiegelman employs an unexpected variety of drawing styles and graphic techniques -- his familiar scrawls; painterly images in soft, pastelish shades; computer scans, sometimes digitized for interpretive effect; and appropriations of long-forgotten newspaper comic-strip characters. Five or six story segments or graphic elements in different styles -- one running vertically, one in a large circle, one broken up into images laid out like snapshots on the floor -- all play off one another in an effect that suggests the scattershot multiformity of the Web.
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani
It is a testament to Art Spiegelman's uncompromising vision that In the Shadow of No Towers - his account of 9/11 and its aftermath - makes no effort to contain or domesticate the surreal awfulness of that day.
USA Today - Christopher Theokas
No Towers is provocative and partisan. But it's also very personal. Spiegelman offers his fears, his horror and his anger for everyone to see.
Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001 it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Francisca Goldsmith - VOYA
In a manner that is both accessible and cogent, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Spiegelman presents his very personal observation of and response to the obliteration of the World Trade Center. Living as he does in lower Manhattan and having children who went to school on the morning of September 11, his experiences of the day's events are relatively at ground zero. By distilling what he saw, felt, thought, and did both in the immediacy of the event and in the weeks following as the event became a political football, he gives readers the opportunity to meet both the physical situation and the cultural ramifications in a kind of aesthetic nakedness that is clarifying and revealing. The physicality of this book is itself studied: A folio printed entirely on board, its narrative is told in full-page spreads that borrow from old comics pages as well as include reportorial panels depicting the WTC's evaporation. The narrative portrays Spiegelman's role as parent, his teenaged daughter's response to the patriotic fervor at her newly assigned school, and his wife's efforts to get a New Yorker cover wrested from him in her role as that magazine's art editor. Despite the text's brevity and the enormity of each spread, it is easy to read this book repeatedly and find new story strands, new realizations of what the event continues to mean, and how history changes even while it is being lived. Processing and shelving this book in libraries should be done respectfully; it is sure to be a lasting icon in American studies. VOYA CODES: 4Q 4P J S A/YA G (Better than most, marred only by occasional lapses; Broad general YA appeal; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10to 12; Adult-marketed book recommended for Young Adults; Graphic Novel Format). 2004, Pantheon, 42p., Ages 12 to Adult.
Library Journal
In his first new graphic novel since Maus, Spiegelman uses his unique artistry to capture the tragedy of 9/11 and what he considers its shameful misappropriation by the U.S. government. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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