Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday January 13, 2011
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THE HORROR! THE HORROR!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read!
THE HORROR! THE HORROR!: Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! Jim Trombetta
Abrams
ISBN 978-0810955950
304 pages
$29.95
FOUR COLOR FEAR: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s Greg Sadowski
Fantagraphics
ISBN 978-1606993439
319 pages
$29.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, who is the mysteries and thrillers editor for The Washington Post Book World
A dozen or so years ago, I had a horrifically delightful experience rummaging through cartons of old comic books at the Library of Congress. In the guise of a journalist, I was reconnecting with the horror comics that had given me bouts of guilty pleasure in the early 1950s. (The guilt came from my own disobedience -- these items were contraband in our household, and I'd read them on the sly over at my friends'.)
Renewing my acquaintance with these artifacts of pop -- teeming as they did with zombies, vampires, A-bomb mutants and severed heads -- was both a treat and perhaps a tragedy in the making: The tales were printed on cheap paper, to which the years had not been kind. As I held the books (under the librarians' watchful eyes), some of their edges crumbled in my hands. It was hard to see what curators might do to save them -- short of taking the books apart and laminating them page by page, and you didn't have to be a bean counter to realize how prohibitively expensive that would be.
Luckily, comics fanatic Jim Trombetta had his own private collection to draw upon in putting together "The Horror! The Horror!," which intersperses color illustrations from hundreds of comics and several full-length stories with essays by Trombetta. Comics used to cost only a dime an issue, but there were enough avid readers to make them, in Trombetta's words, "a huge business in pre-TV times."
As businesses go, however, this one went fast. Alarmed by the gruesomeness, shrinks and politicians put pressure on the publishers, who drew up a code that watered down horror comics to the point of driving them essentially off the market by 1954. But they're back in this delectable volume, in which talking skulls wail "aaiiee," stabbing victims grunt "arrrgh" and the devil himself shows a cloven foot. The book comes with a DVD of a period TV program that inveighs against the evils of comics.
Trombetta isn't the only horror-comics fanatic to inflict pulp monsters on us this season. "Four Color Fear" is editor Greg Sadowski's commemoration of horror publishers other than dominant Entertaining Comics, the firm that brought out "Tales From the Crypt" and "Vault of Horror" monthlies. Though roughly the same size as "The Horror! The Horror!," this volume contains many more complete tales, giving the reader a sense of how hard it was to meet the genre's three main requirements: sudden fear, ample gore and twist endings, all in the space of six to 10 pages.
In his endnotes, Sadowski singles out a tale called "Puppet Peril" for having "everything a good comic book horror story should have: a mittel-European setting, an old dark house, a dungeon, a hunchback, a witch at a cauldron, hypnotism, a hypodermic needle, a lingerie panel, bondage, the undead, demons, and fire -- not to mention sinister puppets." Some of the stories, however, can speak eloquently for themselves. One leads off with this fraught question: "Have you ever heard a strange voice whisper, 'Come with me into the Blackest depths of evil'"? To which I would have answered in the 1950s, "What took you so long to ask?"
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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MR. HOOLIGAN
Ian Vasquez
Minotaur
ISBN 978-0312378110
342 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Daniel Stashower, whose most recent book is "The Beautiful Cigar Girl"
Along the back roads and waterways of Belize, Riley James has spent 20 years doing the bidding of a pair of criminal heavyweights, Carlo and Israel Monsanto, working his way up from errand boy to full-fledged drug runner. The Monsanto brothers have Riley in an iron grip, having kept him out of jail when an early job went horribly wrong. Over the years, however, Riley has nourished the dream of going straight, parlaying his part-ownership of a local bar into a "normal, one might say, boring existence" and perhaps even marrying his American girlfriend. The very notion of a street kid making a fresh start strikes many of his friends as absurd: "Ahh, this idea -- the New Beginning," says one. "Such a common delusion."
But first Riley must strike a risky deal with the Monsantos. He approaches the brothers with a plan to square his debt with a final high-stakes drug run. In a few lines of dialogue, author Ian Vasquez captures the sheer audacity of Riley's proposal, as well as the devastating consequences if he should fail: "You're asking me for plenty, son," Israel Monsanto tells him. "But you know something? I'm gonna go along with it. Only this one time, and only because it's you, Riley. Because you won't last long without me. You're going to come back to me one day after your business fails and you need some fast cash, you're going to come back and beg for a job. Because this work we do, that's what you do best, so don't fool yourself. And if I hire you again, I want you to know: It'll be on my terms."
For all his determination, Riley's drug-running plan quickly unravels as he falls afoul of corrupt government officials, forcing him to improvise a set of dangerous feints and dodges if he's to keep his vow to the Monsantos. Soon, amid escalating violence and betrayals, Riley sees his hopes fading. "He needed to feel, and soon, that he was through with the Life, but the Life was like swimming across the Sibun River," Vasquez writes. "As soon as he reached within a few feet of the grassy bank, stroking hard, exhausted, a cold, swift current would turn him slantways ... tugging him back to the deep spot he'd started from."
"Mr. Hooligan" is the third book from Shamus Award winner Vasquez, who was raised in Belize but now resides in Florida. Vasquez has a bone-deep connection with his setting that transforms an otherwise conventional storyline into a dark modern-day morality play, complete with a pot-smoking ex-nun, Sister Pat, who comments on the action from the sidelines. "I know this story by heart," she declares at one stage, "I wish when I come to this part I could change it, say something else, change the ending." The author's crisp dialogue and low-life atmospherics have drawn comparisons to Elmore Leonard, with whom he shares an abiding respect for the cruel loyalties that can lead decent men astray. When Riley's girlfriend urges him to walk away, telling him he owes nothing to the Monsantos, a lifetime of resentment boils to the surface:
"'Don't owe -- ' He shook his head and looked away. 'Yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. You come here, you think you know these people because of what they do, they're criminals, that's all you see, so you've got them figured out, right? Nah, that's not how it works, though. The thing you don't know is they're the ones, the Monsantos, that fed me many evenings when my mother was so drunk off her ass she could barely stand up, much less cook a little dinner for her son. Israel Monsanto's the one took me in after my old man passed and I had no house to go to. ... And now you're saying, after all these years I worked with them, all they did for me in my desperate days, I just drop them and move on, no worries?"
This is a sharp, gritty novel of redemption and its costs. At the same time, as Sister Pat might say, it's "a crackling good story."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER
Amy Chua
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594202841
237 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Chang
The cover of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" was catnip to this average parent's soul. Although the memoir seems to have been written to prove that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones, the cover text claims that instead it portrays "a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory" and the Tiger Mother's humbling by a 13-year-old. As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers.
And, in many ways, "Tiger Mother" did not disappoint. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughter's stuffed animals if the child didn't improve her piano playing. "What Chinese parents understand," Chua writes, "is that nothing is fun until you're good at it."
By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book can be wickedly gratifying. Reading it is like secretly peering into the home of a controlling, obsessive yet compulsively honest mother -- one who sometimes makes the rest of us look good, if less remarkable and with less impressive offspring. Does becoming super-accomplished make up for years of stress? That's something my daughters and I will never find out.
Chua is a law professor and author of two acclaimed books on international affairs, though readers of "Tiger Mother" get only a glimpse of that part of her life, with airy, tossed off-lines such as "Meanwhile, I was still teaching my courses at Yale and finishing up my second book" while also "traveling continuously, giving lectures about democratization and ethnic conflict."
Her third book abandons global concerns to focus intimately on Chua's attempt to raise her two daughters the way her immigrant parents raised her. There would be no play dates and no sleepovers: "I don't really have time for anything fun, because I'm Chinese," one of Chua's daughters told a friend. Instead, there would be a total commitment to academics and expertise at something, preferably an instrument. Though Chua's Jewish husband grew up with parents who encouraged him to -- imagine! -- express himself, he nonetheless agreed to let her take the lead in rearing the children and mostly serves as the Greek chorus to Chua's crazed actions.
In Chinese parenting theory, hard work produces accomplishment, which produces confidence and yet more accomplishment. As Chua notes, this style of parenting is found among other immigrant cultures, too, and I'm sure many Washington (D.C.)-area readers have seen it, if they don't employ it themselves. Chua's older daughter, Sophia, a pianist, went along with, and blossomed, under this approach. The younger daughter, Lulu, whose instrument of Chua's choice was a violin, was a different story. The turning point came when, after years of practicing and performing, Lulu expressed her hatred of the violin, her mother and of being Chinese. Chua imagined a Western parents' take on Lulu's rebellion: "Why torture yourself and your child? What's the point? ... I knew as a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking." But she nevertheless allowed Lulu to abandon the violin. Given that the worst Lulu ever did was cut her own hair and throw a glass, my reaction was that Chua got off easy in a society where some pressured children cut themselves, become anorexic, refuse to go to school or worse.
No one but an obsessive Chinese mother would consider her healthy, engaging and accomplished daughter deficient because the girl prefers tennis to the violin -- but that's exactly the point.
And, oh, what Chua put herself and her daughters through before she got to her moment of reckoning. On weekends, they would spend hours getting to and from music lessons and then come home and practice for hours longer. At night, Chua would read up on violin technique and fret about the children in China who were practicing 10 hours a day. (Did this woman ever sleep?)
She insisted that her daughters maintain top grades -- Bs, she notes, inspire a "screaming, hair-tearing explosion" among Chinese parents and the application of countless practice tests. She once refused to let a child leave the piano bench to use the bathroom. She slapped one daughter who was practicing poorly. She threatened her children not just with stuffed-animal destruction, but with exposure to the elements. She made them practice on trips to dozens of destinations, including London, Rome, Bombay and the Greek island of Crete, where she kept Lulu going so long one day that the family missed seeing the palace at Knossos.
Sometimes, you're not quite sure whether Chua is being serious or deadpan. For example, she says she tried to apply Chinese parenting to the family's two dogs before accepting that the only thing they were good at was expressing affection. "Although it is true that some dogs are on bomb squads or drug-sniffing teams," she concluded, "it is perfectly fine for most dogs not to have a profession, or even any special skills." On the one hand, she seems aware of her shortcomings: She is, she notes, "not good at enjoying life," and she acknowledges that the Chinese parenting approach is flawed because it doesn't tolerate the possibility of failure. On the other hand, she sniffs that "there are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don't exist in Asia." When not contemptuous, some of her wry observations about Western-style child-rearing are spot-on: "Private schools are constantly trying to make learning fun by having parents do all the work," and sleepovers are "a kind of punishment parents unknowingly inflict on their children through permissiveness."
Readers will alternately gasp at and empathize with Chua's struggles and aspirations, all the while enjoying her writing, which, like her kid-rearing philosophy, is brisk, lively and no-holds-barred. This memoir raises intriguing, sometimes uncomfortable, questions about love, pride, ambition, achievement and self-worth that will resonate among local success-obsessed parents.
Is it possible, for example, that Chinese parents have more confidence in their children's abilities, or that they are simply willing to work harder at raising exceptional children than Westerners are? Unfortunately, the author leaves many questions unanswered as her book limps its way to a conclusion, with Chua acknowledging her uncertainty about how to finish it and the family still debating the pros and cons of her approach (anyone hoping for a total renunciation of the Chinese approach will be disappointed).
Ending a parenting story when one child is only 15 seems premature; in fact, it might not be possible to really understand the impact of Chua's efforts until her daughters have offspring of their own -- perhaps a sequel, or a series ("Tiger Grandmother"!) is in the works. But while this battle might not have been convincingly concluded, it's engagingly and provocatively chronicled.
Readers of all stripes will respond to "Tiger Mother."
Elizabeth Chang is an editor of The Washington Post's Sunday Magazine. She can be reached at changb(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HUMORISTS: From Hogarth to Noel Coward
HUMORISTS: From Hogarth to Noel CowardPaul Johnson
Harper
ISBN 978-0061825910
228 pages
$25.99
AMERICAN FREAK SHOW: The Completely Fabricated Stories of Our New National TreasuresWillie Geist
Hyperion
ISBN 978-1401323943
214 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Jeff Nussbaum
The eminent Paul Johnson has penned histories on subjects ranging from Christianity, to Judaism, to the 20th century (in toto), to art (also in toto).
One can't help admiring someone with the intellectual fecundity (or is it promiscuity?) to write authoritatively on such a range of subjects.
Additionally, Johnson has made books out of his own short biographies of those he considers to be great intellectuals, in the aptly named "Intellectuals." He has done the same for those he considers to be great heroes, in the aptly named "Heroes."
(Had he shown a similar interest in Philadelphia sandwiches, he might have written another book with that for a title.)
This brings us to Johnson's current offering, "Humorists." As that horrible sandwich joke demonstrates, humor is hard. Not just hard to write, but hard to categorize. In his introduction, Johnson assembles a truly enlightening and readable history of humor. He describes one of the earliest recorded dirty jokes, found in the Bible. He investigates the revulsion that puns tend to engender among humorists (and then shows those humorists to be hypocrites by citing their own punning ways).
Johnson does an admirable job of breaking humor down into two main types. The first he describes as "chaos, contemplated in safety," and he categorizes those who work in this space as "comics who create chaos," the Marx Brothers being a classic example. The second type are those who observe and present the human condition to us in all its absurdity, such as the painter Toulouse-Lautrec. These are the humorists, he writes, "who look for, and find, and analyze, the worrying exuberance, and sheer egregious weirdness of the individual human being, and who present them vividly, and accurately for our delight."
Johnson is at his best when he traces current humor traditions back to their roots, as when he shows that Charles Dickens was the inventor of the verbal running gag and Benjamin Franklin the father of the one-liner.
But his short biographies of his chosen humorists tend to fall flat. First, it is never clear whether his goal is to chronicle lives or characterize humor. Second, he offers no methodology behind his choices. Therefore the reader is left with the sinking sensation that we are simply being handed rehashed writings about people whom Johnson found to be funny while researching some other project. This sensation is only intensified by the number of chapters that begin with some version of the following: "It stretches credulity to write of Dr. Samuel Johnson ... as a comic." Thirteen pages later, I found myself saying, "Yes, it does."
My suspicions about the rehashing of his previous work seem further supported by the disproportionate number of painters who have found their way into this volume. While I'm happy to be convinced that William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson each painted canvases that reduced his viewers (some 300 and 200 years ago, respectively) to peals of laughter, reading somewhat dry descriptions of their paintings left me unmoved.
Johnson is clearly a highbrow thinker, yet it seems that his taste in humor runs directly to the puerile. He lavishes attention on Franklin's writings on sex with older women, and he finds occasion to use the word pudenda not once, but twice. Pudenda is nothing if not a funny word.
In his chapter on G.K. Chesterton, Johnson quotes Chesterton: "Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized." Reading this book, I'm forced to conclude that the same should be said of humor.
In the realm of more contemporary humor, we find one Willie Geist. Geist, whose television show "Way Too Early" is a godsend to this father of an insomniac infant, is also responsible for the comic relief on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," where he mocks pop cultural phenomena. His new book, "American Freak Show," is the logical extension of that role, except that instead of simply delighting in the foibles of celebrities, he imagines what they might say in sex rehab (Tiger Woods); e-mail exchanges (Bill and Hillary Clinton); Twitter feeds (Lindsay Lohan's Tweets from a Santa Monica jail); parenting advice (Kate Gosselin); inaugural addresses (Sarah Palin) -- as well as, my personal favorite, what a remake of the film "The Longest Yard" might look like if it took place at Guantanamo Bay.
Not all of "American Freak Show" is fabricated. The book opens with a priceless anecdote about Rod Blagojevich visiting the set of the show, and Geist is actually at his best when he's commenting on experiences like this. So while "American Freak Show" may not place Geist in Paul Johnson's company of great humorists, it easily earns a spot in a less exalted, though no less essential, library, the one you know you keep by the commode.
Jeff Nussbaum is a partner in the speechwriting and strategy firm West Wing Writers, and is a co-founder of a humor writing group, The Humor Cabinet.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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