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Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin by Pierre Assouline
'Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin' by Pierre Assouline
A review by Charles Solomon
With his plus-four knickers, button nose and "squiff" hairdo, Tintin ranks as one of the most recognizable and best-loved characters in comics. However, his creator, Georges "Herge" Remi (1907-83), remains "an elusive figure," as Pierre Assouline notes in this unsatisfying biography: "Most people expect his life to be as straightforward as the lines in his drawings. But it was full of complexity and contradiction, conflicts and paradoxes, of jagged peaks and crevasses." The basic outline of Remi's career has been reported many times: Born into a stuffy, middle-class family in Brussels, he...
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Enough to Change?
A review by Scott F. Parker
What do we value more, our morals or our pleasure and convenience? Or try this formulation: is having inexpensive meat worth the torture of billions of sentient animals a year, the destruction of the environment, and the proliferation of disease and ill health? That's what's at stake in our diets these days, and that's what Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals asks us to ask ourselves: how much do we care about what we care about? Enough to change? Providing specific details about the way our animals become our food, Foer takes the reader soberly and thoroughly through the meat production ...
Lao-Tzu's Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years by Red (trn) Pine
A Wisdom Text of the First Water
A review by Chris Faatz
Everyone needs a Taoteching. After all, Lao-Tzu's is one of the most magnificent, deep, and heady religious voices to have emerged from the world's wisdom traditions. But, there are so many to choose from! There's the Mitchell version, the LeGuin version, and the John C. Wu edition. There's the beautifully illustrated Feng and English edition, and the slightly dated but nonetheless lovely and illuminating Witter Bynner translation. There's even the hoary Legge, if one can deal with its antiquated and clunky English. So, how does one make a choice, considering that there are literally dozens...
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The Poetry of Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke and Edward Snow
Angels to Radios
A review by Ange Mlinko
It is said that the tradition of English poetry began with Caedmon -- an illiterate seventh-century lay brother who, ashamed of his inability to versify when the harp was passed around at a feast, fell asleep in his stable among the animals and dreamed of an angel. This angel, too, bade him sing, and again Caedmon protested that he did not know any songs; but then, inexplicably, he found himself obeying the angel's dictum: "Sing the beginning of the creatures!" Immediately on waking he wrote down the eulogy to the world and its maker that had been transmitted to him in his dream; today the...
The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage
A review by Michael Schaub
As everyone who's worked in a literary profession knows, being a writer and editor is glamorous, fun, lucrative, and generally totally awesome. Even if you're a minor poet whose works are published in tiny literary magazines sponsored by a community college in southeast Nebraska, the biggest problem you'll have on a daily basis is which car to take to the liquor store to buy your top-shelf Islay Scotch and comically expensive cigars. It's not a frustrating, soul-crushing career path in the slightest. Or so, you know, I thought, once upon a time. I was young and naive and believed a lot of...
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard by Richard Brody
Godard the Obscure: What Happened to the Icon of '68?
A review by J. Hoberman
Opening in New York forty years ago this fall, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend appeared as one apocalyptic vision among many. The United States was at war abroad; at home, a tumultuous presidential election was heading into its final stretch. The naked provocateurs of Living Theater had returned from Europe to stage their millennial participation piece, Paradise Now. But Weekend was also something new. For local cinephiles, this was the year of Godard. Nineteen sixty-eight began with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and Weekend was actually the third of his features to have a...
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