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2014
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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.
Publishers 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.
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