notanotherbookreview

A Thinking Woman's Icon, HANNAH ARENDT, celebrated in Ken Krimstein's witty and profound  new graphic novel. THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT : A Tyranny of Truth (Bloomsbury September) I read Hannah Arendt's book  Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil, about the former vacuum cleaner salesman,  German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He  made sure the trains to the gas chambers ran on time packed with passengers. Arendt's account of his trial was a stunning inquiry into the man and the political system he served. Her coverage was controversial, because she depicted  not a monster, but a man frighteningly average.  Ahrendt was an intellectual, a brilliant philosopher, when she fled from Hitler's  terror--from Germany to Paris, from Paris to America.  Coincidentally, it was The New Yorker who asked her to report on the Eichmann Trial and it's the New Yorker cartoonist, Ken...

SUPERZELDA by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta published by One Peace Books It took two Italians, journalist Tiziana Lo Porto and cartoonist Daniele Marotta, to animate that quintessential American creation, Zelda Fitzgerald. Her ecstatic pursuit of life; joy, love, pleasure, is the romance of the Flapper, immortalized by Scott Fitzgerald. Yet this telling adds the dimension of literature from Zelda's journals, letters exchanged, stories both published, his novels, as well as her vast readings from philosophy to poets. Much analysis of Zelda begins and ends with tragic beauty, brilliant and unstable. There are also questions about whether Scott exploited her, not just her archetype but her actual writings, which appear in his novels. Opposed are Fitzgerald fans,who believe she destroyed a great writer, driven to alcohol from her madness. A philosopher quoted that the search for truth often leads to its "bastard substitute" anesthesia. This may be closer than me...