This month our Four on the Fourth series focuses on Graphic Novels. All items are brand new to our collection.
Billie Holiday
Carlos Sampayo
Born in Philadelphia in 1915, and dead too early in New York in 1959, Billie Holiday became a legendary jazz singer, even mythical. With her voice even now managing to touch so many people, we follow a reporter on the trail of the artist on behalf of a New York daily. Beyond the public scandals that marred the life of the star (alcohol, drugs, violence…), he seeks to restore the truth, revisiting the memory of Billie. Through this investigation, Muñoz and Sampayo trace, through the undertones of racism, and in the wake of the blues, the slow drift of a singer who expressed the deepest emotions in jazz.
ML420.H58 S26 2017
Catalog Link – Billie Holiday
Hostage
Guy Delisle
In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, André was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world. Close to twenty years later, award-winning cartoonist Guy Delisle… recounts André’s harrowing experience in Hostage, a book that attests to the power of one man’s determination in the face of a hopeless situation.
HV6604.C282 D5413 2017
Catalog Link – Hostage
Audubon: On the Wings of the World
Fabien Grolleau
At the start of the 19th century, John James Audubon embarked upon an epic ornithological quest across America with nothing but his artist’s materials, an assistant and a gun. Driving him on through terrible storms, encounters with ferocious bears and dangerous people, Audubon’s all-consuming passion for birds came to define his entire life – but what would the world make of his expressive and distinctly unscientific illustrations upon return?
QL31.A9 G7613 2016
Catalog Link – Audubon
Poppies of Iraq
Brigitte Findakly
Poppies of Iraq is Brigitte Findakly’s nuanced tender chronicle of her relationship with her homeland Iraq, co-written and drawn by her husband, the acclaimed cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. In spare and elegant detail, they share memories of her middle class childhood touching on cultural practices, the education system, Saddam Hussein’s state control, and her family’s history as Orthodox Christians in the arab world. Poppies of Iraq is intimate and wide-ranging; the story of how one can become separated from one’s homeland and still feel intimately connected yet ultimately estranged. Signs of an oppressive regime permeate a seemingly normal life: magazines arrive edited by customs; the color red is banned after the execution of General Kassim; Baathist militiamen are publicly hanged and school kids are bussed past them to bear witness. As conditions in Mosul worsen over her childhood, Brigitte’s father is always hopeful that life in Iraq will return to being secular and prosperous. The family eventually feels compelled to move to Paris, however, where Brigitte finds herself not quite belonging to either culture. Trondheim brings to life Findakly’s memories to create a poignant family portrait that covers loss, tragedy, love, and the loneliness of exile.
DS70.62 .F56 2017
Catalog Link – Poppies of Iraq