Author Archive
Guy Delisle is a Canadian-born resident of France who has worked as an animator all over Europe and in Asia. His peripatetic career has taken him to some unusual locations — and he creates graphic novels documenting his sojourns.
The first two are Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. In both, Delisle uses his experiences working for an extended period of time in locations not visited by tourists. Misunderstandings and culture shock are themes shared in these two books — along with Delisle’s gentle cynicism. He pokes fun at institutional hypocrisies and relates encounters with people, recording events both mundane and surreal.
Delisle is not writing travelogues (regardless of his subtitles), these are assemblages of anecdotes — he spends a lot of time in hotel rooms and offices and very little traveling to landmarks or features. Nevertheless, he is able to convey his experiences so vividly that reading his work makes you feel as if you have been transported with him.
The illustrations give rare visual images of places where cameras are forbidden though Delisle’s artwork has a cartoony style and is deceptively simple. With everything rendered with minimal lines and in shades of gray, his depictions have the focused clarity of black-and-white photos. Architectural details, traffic, clothing styles and street scenes are meticulously drawn, often without comment, allowing the reader to soak up backgrounds without being fully aware of it.
Delisle’s latest graphic novel, Burma Chronicles, finds him in a new country, on a much longer stay and in a slightly different role. He is accompanying his wife, a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator and his primary job is caretaker of their baby son, Louis.
Anyone who has ever travelled with a baby will immediately connect with Delisle’s travails with Louis. He also experiences the peculiar phenomenon of caretaker invisibility that occurs when pushing a cute baby in a stroller. Louis opens doors in this closed country and Delisle’s walks with the baby (and the fact that he is living in a neighborhood, not a hotel) give the newest title a richer flavor than the two earlier works.
One of the neighbors is Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, living a cloistered life under house arrest. Discovering her proximity, Delisle attempts to wander down her street with Louis, only to be firmly rebuffed at a guard station. References to The Lady recur throughout the book, her invisible presence is covered in ways that are powerful and affecting.
Terrible glimpses of human rights abuses and of the difficulties and frustrations facing Médecins Sans Frontières staff creep into Burma Chronicles. And the pervasive grimness of life under a powerful military regime is brought into high focus in one memorable passage, where Delisle finds out his negative commentary on Burma to a visiting journalist resulted in a foreign news article that might seriously endanger the life of one of his Burmese acquaintances.
The isolationist government’s maddening oppression along with the the other ills plagueing Burma would render a more direct approach too sorrowful to read about. Guy Delisle’s graphic novels provide a sympathetic outsider’s view to some of the most closed off parts of the world. They are terrific examples of how powerfully words and pictures can combine to carry the reader into the story.
If after reading these you are like me and just can’t get enough, you could visit his terrific website which provides a lot of additonal information about his books.
March 18th, 2009
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
A widow is being tracked by men with dogs, pursued through ditches and woods and rough fields. She is young and scared and not entirely lucid. Her escape is impeded by her heavy mourning clothes. The men after her are relentless and terrifying, two massive and menacing redheaded twins, vigilantly chasing the woman who murdered their brother.
Thus opens The Outlander, one of those riveting books that is impossible to put down. I forced myself to stretch it over two days because I wanted to savor it and now I am left with that bittersweet feeling of having finished a really good read.
Gil Adamson’s first novel is filled with fascinating characters and beautiful language. Set in the Canadian Rockies in 1903, the tale of escape and pursuit is vividly written and (remarkably) fun. It seems a dark tale: a mistreated, troubled young woman murders her cruel husband following the death of their baby. Mary Boulton, the widow, has a tenuous grip on reality — her hallucinations often scare her more than her grim life. Driven by fear and pursued by the vengeful twins, the widow flees across the plains and into the mountains, ill-dressed and unequipped for wilderness survival. The harshness of her brutal survival story is softened immensely by Adamson’s evocative descriptions of the natural world (a worried mother squirrel stomps about “like a miniature, tawny bear”, a lonely horse gazes in the house windows “like a governess peering into a playhouse.”)
The people that the widow encounters in this sparsely-populated country are dazzling: an elderly rescuer and her interesting hired help, a gentle fellow fugitive known as The Ridgerunner, and a strangely pugilistic minister. There is also a boot-legging Italian giant, an opium-peddling dwarf, and a cast of other curious characters. Even the most minor characters are given distinctive, rich personalities — they are a refreshing (though sometimes scary) lot to encounter.
Interesting historical information heightened my feeling of immersion. The difficulties of hunting, cooking, bathing, and laundering in primitive conditions are palpably described. There are intense portrayals of the strictures of turn-of-the century gender roles and the loneliness of frontier life. Which means this book has it all: an interesting plot, a powerful sense of time and place, delicious characters and best of all, Adamson’s brilliant wordsmithery.
February 26th, 2009
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Memoirs by adult survivors of dysfunctional families are a proliferating sub-genre, but this one is particularly appealing and readable. Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story is a story of love and anger and forgiveness — funny, wry and bittersweet.
Dylan Schaffer and his father, Flip, shared a passion for cooking, a single tenuous connection in their fragile and distant relationship. They barely knew one another, having spent little time together since Flip walked out on the family when Dylan and his siblings were very young.
When Flip telephoned in November and suggested that they take a week-long, intensive bread-making class in New York in June, Dylan reluctantly agreed, figuring his dad would probably be dead by the time the class would start. Flip (the kind of hardcore cigarette addict who smoked in the shower) had been diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer.
Dylan is nursing a lifetime of fury at his father, a history professor who accepted a position in South Carolina and left his ex-wife and four children behind in New York. In outline, Dylan’s mother was a resoundingly successful woman: married at seventeen, and mother of four before age thirty, she also managed to graduate from medical school, finish her internship and become a financially-successful psychiatrist. In reality, she was an abysmal parent, crippled by a depression that ultimately ended in suicide. Dylan’s dad was fully aware of his ex-wife’s instability, but never involved himself in parenting his children.
In spending a week baking bread with a father he barely knows, who ought to be dead, Dylan discovers a lot about himself, his dad, and levain. This first part of the book is framed by their adventures in New York (impossible father books an awful hotel, is alternately rude and gallant, charming and repellent). The second section has papa back at his home and at the end of his life, which is in turns heart-breaking and side-splittingly funny.
Almost everyone has difficult relatives that we love and nobody is spared watching beloved people die — but Dylan Schaffer tells his particular story about his particularly difficult “Poppala” really well. Read it and you will laugh and cry and be glad you did.
p.s. Don’t miss the acknowledgments at the back of the book. I am hoping mystery writer Schaffer’s next book will incorporate the real-life story of his murder solving mail carrier.
February 10th, 2009
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Have you read any books set in Côte d’Ivoire?
I hadn’t. There seems to be little written in English about this beautiful and interesting country, other than bleak news accounts of ongoing strife, economic hardship, poverty, and public health woes. However, two recently translated graphic novels show Ivorians in a different light– depicting ordinary people who generally enjoy themselves, while dealing with the universal complications of everyday life (difficult relatives, office politics, friends who are making bad choices).
Author Marguerite Abouet and her husband, illustrator Clément Oubrerie have created a delicious domestic comedy in their graphic novels, Aya and Aya of Yop City (additional volumes have been released in France but are yet-to-be published in English). Abouet deliberately set out to write a book set in Africa that depicted both people and place in a positive way – and she has done that spectacularly! Oubrerie’s richly colored art, alive with expression and subtly detailed backgrounds, shares the storytelling faultlessly.
The books are set in a comfortable suburban neighborhood in Yopougon (Yop City), part of the metropolitan area of the coastal city, Abidjan. The time period is the late 1970s and Abidjan (the “Paris of West Africa”) is prospering. The stories revolve around a young woman, Aya, and her family, friends and neighbors.
19-year-old Aya and her girlfriends are exploring who they are and what they want to be: serious Aya wants to continue her education and become a doctor, while her pals Bintou and Adjoua would rather be out dancing and chasing (and being pursued by) a tempting array of young men. One fateful evening encounter leaves Adjoua pregnant…and her father incensed.
A shot-gun wedding and an enormous reception soon follow. The first book, Aya, ends on a cliff-hanger, with everyone admiring Adjoua’s handsome baby. The second book, Aya of Yop City, begins with the wealthy, imperious parents of goofy newlywed Moussa questioning whether he is truly the father of Adjoua’s beautiful baby.
Social climbing and class struggles, generational conflicts, and all kinds of complicated relationships swirl though the books. There is a big cast of characters, but Oubrerie’s lively and expressive artwork make each individual distinctive and easily identifiable. The second book ends with another bombshell — the kind of situation that would shake up any family — and will leave you happily anticipating the third volume.
The author and illustrator live in France, but Abouet is Ivorian-born and Oubrerie is a frequent visitor to the Côte d’Ivoire. Their smooth collaboration is a lot of fun to read, a frothy soap opera full of riotous color. In Aya and Aya of Yop City, Abouet and Ouberie offer an introduction to people and place that leave the reader eager to return.
January 26th, 2009
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
My mother peruses cookbooks and cooking magazines continuously: forever searching for the perfect stuffing for Cornish hens, a new twist on saucing ham steaks, something novel involving bread pudding, or perhaps anything interesting involving guavas or persimmons. I must have inherited this glitch from her, because I love to browse through cookbooks too (even though I almost never actually cook anything, thanks to a gracious partner).
But I don’t think I have ever before read a cookbook cover-to-cover, every damn word.
I did that tonight.
Even weirder, I don’t think a cookbook ever gave me self-help tips — most especially ones that made sense. Stranger and stranger: this cookbook actually provided me with some useful advice that helped me successfully deal with an odd little parenting crisis ( involving a scrap between my son and his cousin, who spent the winter holiday at our house).
Well, it isn’t exactly a cookbook. It most certainly is not a parenting book. This most useful food-and-life advice book is Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin.
Kenny Shopsin seems wonderfully familiar, a composite of all of the best men I have ever known. A noisy, opinionated, and sometimes downright rude iconoclast, Shopsin dishes up delicious meals while providing some truly useful tips on food prep, relationships, life, and child-rearing, plus fabulous recipes such as Mac n Cheese Pancakes and soups like you never encountered. Shopsin’s imaginative cookery involves a lot of trial-and-error:
“This kind of experimentation has a lot to do not just with creativity but with a lower-than-average repugnance for failure. It goes beyond a willingness to take risks to a willingness to fail miserably.” (p. 81)
His book is unconventional. It tips you off to it’s spirit straight away, with a tab labeled “DO NOT PULL” on the front cover (which of course requires a tug). As soon as you pull that tab, you will be sucked right in to this rewardingly peculiar cookbook — and what a delicious trip it is!
“Eat Me” contains some of the strangest food tips that I have ever encountered. I am still reeling from his idea of transformation of soggy tortillas into delicious crepes, plus the idea of anyone being excited and inspired by lefse… all of that and more is included in Shopsin’s odd blend of interpersonal relations and restauraunteering.
Besides Mr. Shopsin’s sensible advice, he has given my family of picky eaters no end of delicious ideas. A gorgeous book full of mouth-watering recipes, tempting photographs, and absolutely golden life-lessons. I love Kenny S. and I can’t wait to share his book with mom. I think you might like it too!
January 8th, 2009
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope is an engaging and unusual war memoir. It is the story about a military experience that caused a boy to become a man — a long and sometimes surreal process.
But there are no dramatic combat scenes or brutal battles, instead there is 
much celebration of humanity (and the military) at its mundane best. Alan Cope grew up to be a fine man and a splendid raconteur.
Late in Alan’s life, a random encounter with French cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert led to a five-year friendship and collaboration, ultimately resulting in this terrific graphic novel. Originally published as three volumes in France, the new English translation is a single volume — and one of the best books I have read all year.
Alan Cope died in 1999, but Emmanuel Guibert has spent 13 years creating this book, working from taped conversations and Guibert’s vacations to places that Alan lived in the USA, France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy. The art and the text work together seamlessly, telling the story in a wonderfully integrated way.
Alan Ingram Cope grew up in southern California. He remembers being a kid on a bike, delivering newspapers that headlined the attack on Pearl Harbor. Two years later, he turned eighteen and was drafted.
Sent to Fort Knox for basic training (the first vehicle he learned to drive was a tank), Alan received further training and became a radio operations and cryptology instructor. During this time, he developed close friendships with fellow soldiers and a life-long appreciation for music. A falling out with his family left him committed to look on his war experience as an adventure rather than an unfortunate necessity. Alan’s impressively positive outlook shines throughout the book.
He arrived in France on February 19, 1945 — his twentieth birthday. After a tantalizing glimpse of Paris (just the name of the city, painted on a wall outside of a stalled train), his unit was shipped to Normandy — where they idled for two months because their weapons were accidentally lost. Alan’s war involved a lot of time spent sneaking away to connect with friends, and he made friends not only with fellow soldiers but also individuals and families in the countries he was stationed in.
After the war, Alan stayed in Europe and spent most of his adult life working for the American military. Following a religious calling, he briefly returned to attend college in California, but left in 1948. Disillusioned with religious faith and with America, he never returned to the U.S.
Emmanuel Guibert was so taken with Alan’s descriptive skills and storytelling that he has vacationed to places described in the book — his renderings of the California redwoods are awesome, you can imagine walking through his Bavarian villages and French towns. Guibert uses an interesting combination of textured India ink washes and fine, clean lines. A fascinating sample of part of Guibert’s technique, involving “painting” with water can be viewed on this video, posted on American publisher First Second’s web site.
Alan Cope’s story is wonderful in both its minutiae and outlook. There is a lot that is absurd about Alan’s military experience: tales of misbehavior and incompetence and brutishness, but also stories of gentleness and humor and enduring friendships. Guibert’s commitment to preserving his friend’s oral history may result in a second work, about Alan Cope’s California childhood. Tentatively title “Alan’s Youth”.
Alan’s shining resilience and inherent decency, together with Guibert’s spectacular art, give this book a lot of power.
December 26th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Daniel Woodrell writes dark, unflinching tales about the rural poor, in a style he calls “country noir”. Not the slightest bit kitschy or sentimental, Woodrell’s beautiful writing in this sad and violent book caught me completely off-guard. He has created one of the most memorable teenage characters I have ever discovered in fiction — and her story is spectacularly readable and rewardingly provocative.
Winter’s Bone, set in the Missouri Ozarks, is populated with modern hillbillies: jobless people who are desperately poor and living in rundown trailers and ramshackle houses, with methamphetamine labs replacing backwoods moonshine stills. The Dolly family has deep roots in the Rathlin Valley, and almost all of those roots are tangled up with the wrong side of the law.
The heroine, sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly, is searching for her father, Jessup, a crank cooker who jumped bail after posting the family house as part of his court bond. Ree has one week to track down her father or her family (Ree, her mentally ill mother, and her 8 and 10-year-old brothers) will be left homeless.
Ree’s beloved Mom, with “her mind broke and the parts scattered”, is rendered near-catatonic with morning medications and only slightly more lucid from evening ones. Two little brothers are hungry and needy and in danger of following the Dolly tradition of being “dead to wonder by age twelve.” The boys missed out on their parents’ better years, when they were still physically and mentally present enough to actually parent. Ree is the only parent the boys have ever known; teaching them to shoot, to hunt, to cook, to box, to wash their fragile mama’s hair. Survival skills both harsh and kind. She also shows them pictures, teaching them about the years back, when their mother was beautiful and vibrant, when their father was present.
This is a violent, dark, mean tale. There is no sugar-coating here: it almost all hurts but is redeemed by tiny moments of kindness, by the gentleness of the roughest characters. There are some laugh-aloud funny bits, that sweeten things up a bit, but it is not a book for the squeamish. Drugs are neither glorified nor vilified, they are part of the story. Bad people do good things, good folks do wrong. Messages are left for the reader to sort out.
Woodrell’s beautiful phrasing, his ear for the language of the Ozarks and for describing things most of us can barely fathom, let alone articulate, raises this brief novel up. It is a powerful book! Weird, rough and strangely poetic, this is a book that will give you a lot to think about. The Dolly clan also appears in Woodrell’s earlier book, Give Us a Kiss
December 1st, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
With the film version of the book Twilight opening this week, vampire fever seems to have descended on the nation. “Vampy” fiction is in high demand and library hold lists are building. While you wait, why not spend some time learning about real vampires? They are very strange, interesting and often connected to your everyday life.
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures is an entertaining introduction into the natural history of sanguivores (creatures that consume blood). Author Bill Schutt, a biologist with joint positions at Long Island University and the American Museum of Natural History, seems to have had quite a bit of fun in the process of learning about his topic and he has a lot of knowledge to share. His enthusiasm is contagious!
Dr. Schutt starts out with a bang, beginning with a deliciously thrilling description of field research at it’s finest. Schutt, his wife Janet, and a Trinidadian scientist explore the massive, abandoned ice house at Wallerfield, the former US military base. Seeking vampire bats in the decaying building, Schutt’s evocation of the claustrophobic ruin (and an elevator shaft filled with water and bat guano) are vividly described.
Blood feeding is a hard way to survive and Schutt’s description of various evolutionary hypotheses on how assorted sanguivores may have developed is satisfyingly detailed. Besides the infamous (but misunderstood and endangered) vampire bats, other well-known obligate sanguivorous creatures such as leeches, ticks, fleas are covered. The addition of creatures new to me (such as the “vampire finch” of the Galapagos — primarily a seed-eater) and digressions into the history of medicine (did you know George Washington died after his well-meaning but misinformed team of physicians nearly exsanguinated him?) keep things rolling along.
The professor is a funny fellow, with a lot of amusing anecdotes, funny footnotes and some groaningly-bad puns. His book is far-reaching, though a bit uneven, rambling from the folklore of vampires to the chemical composition of blood, touching on colony collapse disorder and mentioning his many aunts named Rose. Gorgeous illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne accompany the book. Ms. Wynne also provided art for Schutt’s handsome Dark Banquet website, which contains a not-to-be missed collection of Blood Recipes.
November 18th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Bill Mauldin’s single-panel Army cartoons featuring the everyman infantrymen, Willie & Joe, are instantly recognizable to many people (even those of us born well after WWII). Mauldin’s 1945 book Up Front was one of the biggest best-sellers of the time and is still in print.
Willie & Joe: The WWII Years is a handsome, two-volume set of Mauldin’s complete works. Volume One covers the homefront, from 1940-1943. Volume Two contains the overseas cartoons, created between 1943-1945. The 18 page introduction, playfully gussied up as a declassified war memorandum, provides a tantalizing overview of Mauldin’s life and career.
Ex-GIs recognize Bill Mauldin’s characters, Willie and Joe, at a glance. I learned this because volume one was sitting next to me on the reference desk, and three different men who were passing by noticed and commented favorably about Mauldin — their eyes caught by the small, black drawing on the book’s dark green cloth cover.
For even more information, the Library of Congress hosts a gorgeous online tribute in a web exhibition, Bill Mauldin: Beyond Willie & Joe or you might check out Todd De Pastino’s new biography, Bill Mauldin: A Life Upfront.
September 18th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow is a fast read (less than 90 pages) which is more a story of the segregated South than a biography of Satchel Paige. The author, UW-Madison alumnus James Sturm, throws a curveball with his title: it showcases the celebrity of Satchel Paige through the eyes of an imagined contemporary. It is an odd blend of fiction and biography, telling a bittersweet, fictionalized story of segregation and oppression while providing teasing glimpses of the famed pitcher.
The story is narrated by Emmet Wilson, a sharecropper from Tuckwilla, Alabama. In 1929, Emmet is a young man full of hope, dreaming of making it big in baseball’s Negro National League. His career is cut short by a knee injury sustained when sliding into home plate during a game pitched by the rising young star, Satchel Paige.
Emmet returns to Tuckwilla, raising cotton on land owned by two other former baseball players — the wealthy, white Jennings twins. The 1930s and early ’40s fly by, with the inequities sharecropping and the menacing dangers facing blacks in rural Alabama scarily presented. Emmet’s attempts to keep his son in school during during cotton picking season are horrifically squashed by the twins.
The story jumps to 1944, when the Jennings brothers arrange a local baseball event featuring the now-legendary Satchel Paige and his traveling All-Stars playing against a team of local (white) heroes, The Tuckwilla All-Stars. Baseball long behind him, Emmet is loathe to attend the game but is pulled along by his beloved son, Emmet, Jr. The kid had heard rumors of his father’s baseball past, but nothing firsthand from his dad: “I don’t talk about my days as a ballplayer. It’s like talkin’ about a dead man.” And Emmet is almost a dead man, he has been beaten down by day-to-day life, by segregation and discrimination and the hardships of trying to raise his black child in a white man’s world. The ball game does and does not change all of that…
Rich Tommaso’s illustrations are as understated and roundabout as the story, with heavy black ink and strange pea-green washes of color (deepening to swampier tones during the darker parts of the storyline). This is not a “pretty” book, but the somber colors and simple drawing style elegantly compliment the text.
The last four pages of the book are “panel discussions”, with text providing additional information on topics touched on in the graphics and story. This is a weirdly moving book. Once you get in there, it does not let you out until the end. It is good!
It is a story of many defeats, both large and small — yet ends triumphantly. As an introduction to segregation and Satchel Paige, it serves more to intrigue than to inform, but any title that raises topics that lead to further reading is a good read in my book.
August 19th, 2008
Barbara - Alicia Ashman
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