The Early Read on Graphic Histories
When a story seems too big or too upsetting for words, sometimes pictures can do the trick. This fall, a wide range of graphic histories will become available on every subject from the life of Trotsky to a journalist's experiences in the Gaza Strip -- beautiful and harrowing books that tell their stories in multiple dimensions.
Footnotes in Gaza
By Joe Sacco (December 2009, Henry Holt)
Footnotes in Gaza
By Joe Sacco (December 2009, Henry Holt)
Cartoonist-reporter Joe Sacco journeyed to Rafah, a town in the Gaza Strip that is notorious for conflict. Sacco spent over a year absorbing daily life in an attempt to uncover details of Israel’s four-month occupation of Gaza in 1956. Footnotes provides a visual history of that difficult time of conflict in the Middle East and of Sacco’s more recent experiences there.
Trotsky: A Graphic Biography
By Rick Geary (October 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Geary’s latest work, Trotsky, seeks to unpack the duality of a man who was as much demonized as he was revered. In this visual portrait of one of the Soviet Union’s most dynamic early communist leaders, Geary tells the story of Leon Trotsky’s life and his rise to political power.
The Vietnam War: A Graphic History
By Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Wayne Vansant (September 2009, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A longtime writer on military subjects, Zimmerman creates a political timeline of the war in Vietnam in images, beginning in the 1960s and continuing through the capture of Saigon in 1975. The story jumps back and forth from Vietnamese jungles to the Watergate Hotel, encapsulating a powerful, tumultuous time in world history.
Red Star Over Russia: A Visual History of the Soviet Union from the Revolution to the Death of Stalin
By David King (September 2009, Abrams)
With a collection of more than 550 images, ranging from advertisements and political posters to photographs and magazine pages, Red Star Over Russia offers a history of the images that defined the Soviet Union, evoking the drama of the communist era. King, formerly art editor of London’s Sunday Times Magazine, has unearthed otherwise lost Soviet artists, celebrating them as creative forces of their time.
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