Review by New York Times Review
THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE. A Graphic Memoir: A Childhood in the Middle East (1978-1984), by Riad Sattouf. Translated by Sam Taylor. (Metropolitan/Holt; paper, $26.) With fluent prose and precise drawing, a cartoonist depicts his father's flaws. NOT ON FIRE, BUT BURNING, by Greg Hrbek. (Melville House, $25.95.) This impressive novel explores the aftermath of an imagined "8/11," which evokes people's best and worst selves. THE SONG MACHINE: Inside the Hit Factory, by John Seabrook. (Norton, $26.95.) A New Yorker writer looks at producers, executives, songwriters and artists in the troubled music business. HERE, by Richard McGuire. (Pantheon, $35.) A corner of the living room of the author's childhood home in New Jersey is viewed over a period of eons in this graphic novel, which introduces a third dimension to the flat page. THUNDER AND LIGHTNING: Weather Past, Present, Future, by Lauren Redniss. (Random House, $35.) How human beings live with nature, combining information with striking illustration. SUPERFORECASTING: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner. (Crown, $28.) To become a superforecaster, rely on data and logic and eliminate personal bias. STEP ASIDE, POPS: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection, by Kate Beaton. (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95.) Recent strips from Beaton's audacious online comic, collected here, cover a wide range of topics. THE SEARCHER, by Simon Toyne. (Morrow/ HarperCollins, $26.99.) This novel about a man with amnesia grabs our attention and keeps it. THE KILLING KIND, by Chris Holm. (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26.) A fast-moving, well-constructed thriller about an assassin who kills assassins. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* History echoes across millennia in one New Jersey living room in McGuire's brilliant and affecting Here, an expansion of a strip printed in Raw magazine in 1989. It opens with a view of an empty room in 2014, then 1957, then 1942. There are small changes throughout the decades wallpaper pattern, color palette, a chair here, a pull-out bed there, and scores of inhabitants and, gradually, the pages become layered with inset boxes revealing glimpses of other moments in that very spot over the course of history. While one woman plays piano in the room in 1964, others dance in the same space in 1932, 2014, and 1993. Destruction reigns in a crowded spread where, in 2111, rising seas pour through the window, and insets reveal more than a dozen insults and minor disasters splattered all over the page. The past extends into prehistory, with smoky, mottled backgrounds revealing a churning, primordial planet, while the future reveals odd floating furniture but exactly the same human emotions. McGuire's quiet artwork in a subdued full-color palette reveals nuanced gestures beautifully, sometimes with precise lines, others in sketchy sepia tones, all of which emphasize the passage of time. The concept is stunningly simple, and in laying bare the universality of existence its beauty, ugliness, and mundanity it is utterly moving.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Expanding on an influential piece that first appeared in Raw in 1989, McGuire, best known for his illustrated children's books, explores a single patch of land (apparently in Perth Amboy, N.J.) over the course of millions of years. As in the earlier version, McGuire's perspective is fixed in what is (for most of the book) the corner of a family room, even as the narrative skips across centuries. At the beginning and end, dinosaurs and futuristic animals (respectively) stalk pages unadorned by people. But throughout most of the book, the reader sees human families dance, die, celebrate, fracture, and just live. A Native American couple makes out in the woods, people in 1980s garb pose for a portrait, a 24th-century team waves Geiger counters, a 1999 cat pads across the frame, and so on. The flat, hard lines produce art that looks like an approximation of Edward Hopper's clean bright paintings, created on an outdated computer program. McGuire threads miniplots and knowing references through his hopscotch narrative, building up a head of steam that's almost overwhelmingly poignant. His masterful sense of time and the power of the mundane makes this feel like the graphic novel equivalent of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Illustrator McGuire (What's Wrong With This Book, 1997, etc.) once again frames a fixed space across the millennia.McGuire's original treatment of the conceptpublished in 1989 in Raw magazine as six packed pageshere gives way to a graphic novel's worth of two-page spreads, and the work soars in the enlarged space. Pages unspool like a player-piano roll, each spread filled by a particular time, while inset, ever shifting panels cut windows to other eras, everything effervescing with staggered, interrelated vignettes and arresting images. Researchers looking for Native American artifacts in 1986 pay a visit to the house that sprouts up in 1907, where a 1609 Native American couple flirtatiously recalls the legend of a local insatiable monster, while across the room, an attendee of a 1975 costume party shuffles in their direction, dressed as a bear with arms outstretched. A 1996 fire hose gushes into a 1934 floral bouquet, its shape echoed by a billowing sheet on the following page, in 2015. There's a hint of Terrence Malick's beautiful malevolence as panels of naturea wolf in 1430 clenching its prey's bloody haunch; the sun-dappled shallows of 2113's new seahaunt scenes of domesticity. McGuire also plays with the very concept of panels: a boy flaunts a toy drum in small panels of 1959 while a woman in 1973 sets up a projection screen (a panel in its own right) that ultimately displays the same drummer boy from a new angle; in 2050, a pair of old men play with a set of holographic panels arranged not unlike the pages of the book itself and find a gateway to the past. Later spreads flash with terrible and ancient supremacy, impending cataclysm, and distant, verdant renaissance, then slow to inevitable, irresistible conclusion. The muted colors and soft pencils further blur individual moments into a rich, eons-spanning whole. A gorgeous symphony. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
