A vibrant cultural history.
How to exhibit humankind.
British anthropologist Kuper brings an authoritative perspective to his vigorous examination of ethnography and anthropology museums, which emerged in Europe and the U.S. in the mid-1800s. These venues displayed “an exotic world of ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ peoples who lived far away or long ago.” As European nations expanded their empires into Oceania and Africa and the U.S. extended itself west of the Mississippi, collectors made off with all manner of artifacts. Early British, French, and German museums often reflected a collector’s vision and the sheer abundance of their discoveries. Museums presented not only cabinets of curiosities and pillaged souvenirs, but evidence of the superiority of civilized cultures—evidence, that is, of Western progress from savage origins. The advent of evolutionary theory, though controversial, led some museums to reconsider that idea, organizing collections into cultural or geographical areas rather than on a timeline. Gradually, museums came to rely on anthropologists and ethnographers, although experts often clashed over the meaning of artifacts and the mission of a museum itself. Kuper’s deeply researched history is enlivened with sharply delineated profiles of figures such as anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, naturalist Jeffries Wyman, and James Smithson, the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat who willed his small fortune to the U.S. for the establishment of an institution devoted to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” After much haggling, Congress agreed to fund the Smithsonian Institution. The intellectual and political debates that roiled museums grew heated by the 1960s, when a “cauldron of controversy” arose “about race, colonialism, cultural appropriation and the very nature of scientific authority.” Claims for restitution of artifacts and debate over scholarship versus native expertise continue to vex curators. Strongly on the side of scholarship, Kuper advocates for cosmopolitan museums that can transcend “ethnic and national identities” and “challenge boundaries.”
A vibrant cultural history.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780593700679
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
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