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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
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| Book | Searching... Dracut - Moses Greeley Parker Memorial Library | YA/GRAPHIC/SPIEGELMAN | 31482001857583 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book (Hamilton-Wenham) | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | OV Y 973.931 SPI | 30470000117969 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | GRAPHIC 973.931 SPI OVERSIZED | 31481003847485 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | ADULT GRAPHIC SPI | 31548001820308 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... West Newbury - G.A.R. Memorial Library | OV 741.5 SPI | 32135000808622 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
For the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus , the terrorist attacks of September 11th were both highly personal and intensely political. In the Shadow of No Towers is a masterful and moving account of the events and aftermath of that tragic day.
Spiegelman and his family bore witness to the attacks in their lower Manhattan neighborhood: his teenage daughter had started school directly below the towers days earlier, and they had lived in the area for years. But the horrors they survived that morning were only the beginning for Spiegelman, as his anguish was quickly displaced by fury at the U.S. government, which shamelessly co-opted the events for its own preconceived agenda.
He responded in the way he knows best. In an oversized, two-page-spread format that echoes the scale of the earliest newspaper comics (which Spiegelman says brought him solace after the attacks), he relates his experience of the national tragedy in drawings and text that convey--with his singular artistry and his characteristic provocation, outrage, and wit--the unfathomable enormity of the event itself, the obvious and insidious effects it had on his life, and the extraordinary, often hidden changes that have been enacted in the name of post-9/11 national security and that have begun to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Spiegelman's new work is an inventive and vividly graphic work of nonfiction. It's an artful rant focused on the events of 9/11 and afterward by a world-class pessimist ("after all, disaster is my muse"). The artist, who lives in downtown Manhattan, believes the world really ended on Sept. 11, 2001 it's merely a technicality that some people continue to go about their daily lives. He provides a hair-raising and wry account of his family's frantic efforts to locate one another on September 11 as well as a morbidly funny survey of his trademark sense of existential doom. "I'm not even sure I'll live long enough," says a chain-smoking, post-9/11 cartoon-mouse Spiegelman, "for cigarettes to kill me." The book is a visceral tirade against the Bush administration ("brigands suffering from war fever") and, when least expected, an erudite meditation on the history of the American newspaper comic strip, born during the fierce circulation wars of the 1890s right near the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. This beautifully designed, oversized book (each page is heavy board stock) opens vertically to offer large, colorful pages with Spiegelman's contemporary lamentations along with wonderful reproductions of 19th-century broadsheet comic strips like Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley and Rudolf Dirk's Katzenjammer Kids. Old comics, Spiegelman (Maus) writes, saved his sanity. "Unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the 20th century... they were just right for an end-of-the world moment." This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
The pivotal image from "my 9/11 morning", writes Art Spiegelman, one that "still remains burned on to the inside of my eyelids several years later - was the image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporised". A resident of Lower Manhattan, Spiegelman witnessed 9/11 first-hand, scrambling with his wife to retrieve their two children from schools nearby. He spent the next three years creating In the Shadow of No Towers , in order, he says, to distil and depict his own memories of the event and his government's unfolding response to it. Spiegelman has experienced a type of phantom-limb syndrome since September 11 2001: the "glowing bones" haunt every page. In the Shadow of No Towers is structurally unusual. An introductory essay is followed by 20 large-format cardboard pages. These are designed to be read vertically, so the spreads are broadsheet newspaper-size pages, each one a story. "The giant scale of the colour newsprint pages seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events," Spiegelman explains. His 9/11 monument has an introductory essay and 10 broadsheet stories, followed by a "comic supplement" (another essay and seven more colour plates). In addition, there are endpapers adapting a 1901 edition of The World newspaper reporting the attempted assassination of President McKinley. The book is not an organic narrative, in other words, and that is to the point. The "comic supplement", like the endpapers, prompts one to reread the 9/11 pages and examine why Spiegelman resurrected certain comic characters, created a century earlier by American journalism's "twin titans", Joseph Pulitzer and Randolph Hearst, near the future site of Ground Zero. Answering an interviewer's question whether these endpapers would perplex his readers, he replied: "That's exactly the point of the book, thank you." Many of the old comic stars reappear, embodying the buildings and, simultaneously, the Spiegelman family, struggling to cope. After 9/11 many New Yorkers found that poetry such as Auden's "September 1, 1939" articulated their fears and grief. For Spiegel man, old comics epitomised the vulnerability of the towers and life. He was haunted by characters such as the "Yellow Kid" comic stars - "twin Kids [who] towered over the New York skyline" - who paved the way for several key characters in comic history. In the Shadow of No Towers is most compelling as it charts the changing memory of 9/11. The last panel shows how time only widens the gap between those who can escape the shadow of 9/11 and those direct trauma victims who cannot. By 2004, Spiegelman has not forgotten, nor have those who lost loved ones. Yet public focus has cer tainly shifted elsewhere, to Iraq, to the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan; and, as Spiegelman argues, to the upcoming election. Spiegelman alludes to his parents' Holocaust experience by depicting his family as mice, a technique he used throughout Maus . Similarly, the Auden quote - "The unmentionable odour of death offends the September night" - echoes his father's description of the smoke in Auschwitz as "indescribable", something Spiegelman finally understood after 9/11. "That's exactly what the air in Lower Manhattan smelled like." But it does not feel as if the artist intends to equate the two events. Rather, Spiegelman subtly suggests that as he stands on the "faultline where World History and Personal History collide", struggling to articulate trauma, loss and memory, he can better understand the plight of others caught in the aftermath of large-scale violence. In the Shadow of No Towers bears reading this September 11 as we remember them. Aili McConnon has lectured on 9/11 literature and art as a Princeton University "ReachOut 56" fellow. To order In the Shadow of No Towers for pounds 17 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-baker.1 [Art Spiegelman] alludes to his parents' Holocaust experience by depicting his family as mice, a technique he used throughout Maus . Similarly, the Auden quote - "The unmentionable odour of death offends the September night" - echoes his father's description of the smoke in Auschwitz as "indescribable", something Spiegelman finally understood after 9/11. "That's exactly what the air in Lower Manhattan smelled like." But it does not feel as if the artist intends to equate the two events. Rather, Spiegelman subtly suggests that as he stands on the "faultline where World History and Personal History collide", struggling to articulate trauma, loss and memory, he can better understand the plight of others caught in the aftermath of large-scale violence. In the Shadow of No Towers bears reading this September 11 as we remember them. - Aili McConnon.
Booklist Review
With Maus, Spiegelman proved that the comics medium was capable of tackling even so delicate and contentious a subject as the Holocaust. Now, in his most ambitious project since that 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, he shows that comics are equally up to the challenge of addressing the horror of 9/11. Spiegelman lives and works in lower Manhattan, and he witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center. He uses an array of drawing styles and narrative devices to convey his outrage and helplessness following the attacks, and he depicts himself as the ultimate urban neurotic, railing against the events and their exploitation by the Bush administration to pursue its war in Iraq. Working in full color on cardboard pages big enough to suggest newspaper broadsheets, Spiegelman incorporates characters and motifs from the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century strips to which he resorted for solace after the attacks. Although the book shows off Spiegelman's unmatched command of the comics medium even better than the highly acclaimed Maus, his technical mastery doesn't get in the way of his ardor. While it's impossible for any single work to come to grips fully with the atrocity of 9/11, Spiegelman presents a strikingly vivid response that is at once heartfelt and thoughtful. --Gordon Flagg Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist revisits the traumas of September 11, 2001, and considers America's "colonialist adventure in Iraq." (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.