Review by Booklist Review
After three pages on the Parisian origins of cultural bohemia, coeditor Buhle's latest comics anthology confines itself to America mostly to New York City, though San Francisco gets a few nods except for one subchapter, Les salons de Paris, on post-WWI American expats. It's primarily a procession of profiles of specific people punctuated by accounts of particularly important phenomena (e.g., Oscar Wilde in America, Germans and Jews, the Ethnic Bohemians) that include further profiles. Walt Whitman receives a full chapter. Subchapters cover free-love propagandist and presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, party-giver and patroness Mabel Dodge, Harlem Renaissance kingpin Claude McKay, novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten, singer-dancer Josephine Baker, and others. Though granting that bohemians weren't, in any consistent way, political-minded, radical historian Buhle tilts the presentation to the Left, presumably with the ardent assent of his coeditor, Berger, a vocal occupier of Wall Street. The wide variety of illustrators involved come mostly from the alternative-comics scene, and the book is dedicated to the late underground artist Spain Rodriguez, whose two-pager on Henry Miller opens chapter 6.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Buhle (founder, Radical America; editor, Radical Jesus) and New York City-based Berger edit and contribute a few scripts to this broad collection of prominent and not-so-prominent Bohemian individuals. Buhle begins with an introduction that distinguishes the denizens of a particular Eastern European district from the colloquial use of Bohemian as a term for artistic, social, and political rebels. Although Bohemian enclaves existed in many European and American cities, the editors concentrate on the fertile metropolis of New York through the 1950s. Biographies cover such luminaries as Walt Whitman, Victoria Woodhull, Alfred Steiglitz, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, and Woody Guthrie. Free love and homosexuality appear alongside anarchism, socialism, and communism, but it is the wide variety of creative forms from various artists including Hilary Allison, Mark Crilley, and Sabrina Jones, among others, that take center stage. Literature, poetry, photography, and painting feature prominently, as do jazz and dance, but journalism and even Yiddish puppet theater make an appearance. As befits an anthology, the imaginative styles of these black-and-white comics are also quite varied but each skillfully executed. Verdict This collection is both a visual treat and an edifying look at alternative culture that should appeal both to comics fans and students of "bohemia."-Eric Norton, McMillan Memorial Lib., Wisconsin Rapids (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What do Walt Whitman, Josephine Baker and Woody Guthrie have in common? Here, their lives are interwoven with the artistic and cultural movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, all under the umbrella of "bohemianism." Brooklyn-based writer Berger and prolific graphic-arts editor Buhle (A People's History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation, 2008, etc.) make fine selections in this thoughtful successor to Harvey Pekar's The Beats: A Graphic History (2009). In a thorough introduction, Buhle explains the roots of the idea of bohemianism: The real Bohemia, a geographical entity eventually swallowed up by the Czech Republic, was misidentified by French journalists as the source of Europe's gypsy culture. But Berger and Buhle focus more on those remarkable individuals and movements whose artistic and political spirits ran contrary to the traditions of their times. The writers get the most attention, with stories devoted to spiritual comrades Whitman, Oscar Wilde and Henry Miller, among others. Two very different stories examine the grace of dancer Baker and the beautiful, messy story of Billie Holiday and the song "Strange Fruit." Other chapters combine stories to capture the origins of cultural movements, such as "Art and the Artist," which portrays the arrival of modern art in New York in 1915 in astonishing detail. Other chapters summarize the arcs of the labor movement, modern dance and the earliest seeds of the folk music movement, represented here by Guthrie. All of the art is bold and visually distinct; fittingly, many of the artists have deep roots in the underground comics scenee.g., Peter Kuper. A truly poignant coda by cartoonist Mark Crilley imagines a young Pekar and R. Crumb spending a day together in Cleveland, visiting record and book stores, talking shop and lamenting the paving over of the old world. A terrific appraisal of culture's gypsies, tramps and thieves, worthy of the editors' judgment: "Obituaries for bohemia have, in short, always been premature."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
