Sacco Wins Ridenhour Prize

For the first time, the Ridenhour Book Prize has been given to an illustrated book: Footnotes in Gaza, by Portland graphic journalist Joe Sacco, a book about a forgotten crime in the Gaza Strip in 1956.

Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Buried deep in the history of the town is a bloody incident -- cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake -- in which 111 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Sacco immersed himself in the daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, the book captures the essence of a tragedy.

Sacco was born in Malta in 1960 and grew up in Australia and LA before his family moved to Beaverton, Oregon, where he graduated from Sunset High School. He earned his BA in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1981. Sacco has become one of the most well-respected comic book artists of his generation. But he's not so much a graphic novelist as a journalist, reporting on world events through graphics. Some of his previous books include Safe Area Gorazde, But I Like It, and Palestine, for which he won The American Book Award. Sacco currently lives in Portland.

We profiled Footnotes in Gaza on the Bookbroads Blog in December, and The Oregonian named the book one of the Top Books of the Year in 2009. The book is also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize.

The Ridenhour Book Prize honors an outstanding work of social significance from the prior publishing year. The prize also recognizes investigative and reportorial distinction. In this year's announcement, the organization noted "The judges for The Ridenhour Book Prize honor Sacco's tenacious reporting and recognize Footnotes in Gaza as a work of profound social significance, one that explores the complex continuum of history. At a time when peace in the Middle East has never seemed more elusive, Sacco's illustrations bear witness to the lives of those who are trapped by the conflict. This marks the first time that the Ridenhour judges have awarded the prize to an illustrated book, but in the words of David Hajdu in The New York Review of Books, 'There is virtually no precedent for what he does.... Sacco is legitimately unique.'"

Sacco is the seventh recipient of the Ridenhour Book Prize, established to honor Ron Ridenhour. In 1969, Vietnam veteran Ron Ridenhour wrote a letter to Congress and the Pentagon describing the horrific events at My Lai – the infamous massacre of the Vietnam War – bringing the scandal to the attention of the American public and the world. Ridenhour later became a respected investigative journalist, winning the George Polk Award for Investigative Journalism in 1987 for a year-long investigation of a New Orleans tax scandal. He died suddenly in 1998 at the age of 52. Last year's winner of the book prize was Jane Mayer for her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Congratulations, Joe, on this well-deserved honor!

Day Twenty-Two: Footnotes in Gaza

Welcome to Day Twenty-Two in The 24 Days of Books. Today's book is hot off the press. Footnotes in Gaza, by Portland cartoonist-reporter Joe Sacco, is a sweeping, original investigation of a forgotten crime in the most tormented of places: Rafah, a town at the bottom-most tip of the Gaza Strip -- a town where raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafa -- cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake -- reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco came to Gaza and immersed himself in daily life, uncovering Rafah past and present. Spanning fifty years and moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheiks, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy. As in his previous work, Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into an intimate and immediate experience. According to Publisher's Weekly, "Having already established his reputation as the world's leading comics journalist, Sacco... is now making a serious case to be considered one of the world's top journalists, period....It's his exacing and harrowing interviews that make this book an invaluable piece of journalism."

This book just hit stores today, and it's destined to be another big seller. Last Sunday The Oregonian named Footnotes in Gaza one of the Top Ten Northwest Books for 2009, so come and get it before the shelves are bare. For many more gift-giving ideas, check out our gargantuan December newsletter, which you can read by clicking here.

Day Fifteen: The Book of Genesis

It's Day 15 in The 24 Days of Books, and today we're going graphic on you. The Book of Genesis: Illustrated by R. Crumb. From the creation to the death of Joseph, all fifty chapters of The Book of Genesis, revealingly illustrated by the one and only Robert Crumb. Crumb, one of the original masters of alternative comics, has rendered the first book of the bible, word-for-word, using his signature style, and even, dare I say it, a little bit of grace. You really have to see it to believe it. Crumb originally thought that he would do a takeoff of Adam and Eve, but he became so fascinated by the Bible's language, "a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions," that he decided instead to do a literal interpretation assembled primarily from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James Version. This is an astonishing work from one of our greatest artistic geniuses.

For many more gift-giving ideas, check out our gargantuan December newsletter, which you can read by clicking here.

Day Eight: Asterios Polyp

It's Day Eight of The 24 Days of Books, and today we're talking graphic novels, specifically, Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli. Publishers Weekly calls Mazzucchelli’s new book “the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel.” It is the story of Asterios Polyp, an award-winning architect none of whose designs have ever actually been built. His life at the age of 50 has fallen into shambles. After his New York apartment burns down, he sets out to create a new life in small-town America. All the while, Mazzucchelli reveals scenes from Polyp’s life that illuminate how he came to be in his current state of decline. Asterios Polyp is an excellent gateway graphic novel for those who are new to the genre.

Here are a few other great graphic "novels" to check out: Stitches: A Memoir, by David Small (finalist for National Book Award); A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld; The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre, and Frederic Lemercier; and, finally, one of my all-time favorites, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel. Good stuff! We got lots more too.

The Photographer: A Moving Documentary

In 1986, French photographer Didier Lefèvre left Paris for Afghanistan for his first major assignment as a photojournalist, accompanying a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) expedition to establish one field hospital and staff another. At that time in Afghanistan, war was raging betweem the Soviet Union and the Afghan Mujahideen. The photographs taken by Lefèvre on that three-month trip form the heart of a new book, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, a book that is part photojournalism and part graphic memoir. It is published by First Second Books.

A decade after his first trip, Lefèvre sat down with his friend and acclaimed French graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert to tell his story. Guibert based his writing and drawing of the book on their hours of interviews. Frederic Lemercier, a graphic designer, created the design for the book, and Alexis Siegel provided the translation and wrote the introduction. Together, the work of these four people tells the moving story of an arduous and dangerous journey undertaken by men and women intent on mending what others destroy.

Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm, called this graphic documentary "a work of stunning originality and power....a truly inspiring piece of work." The book was first published in three volumes in France between 2003 and 2006 and was an immediate hit. It has since been published in eleven languages. The First Second Books American version came out last May. Before he died in 2007 (he was born in 1957), Lefevre traveled back to Afghanistan seven more times in an attempt to tell the stories of the people he could not forget -- despite having nearly died on his first trip there.

Katrina from A to Z

My brother and his wife and kids live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is a few hours west of New Orleans and quite close to the Gulf of Mexico. When Hurricane Katrina and then Hurricane Rita came through, it was a pretty scary time -- especially with Rita, since the eye of the that storm passed almost directly over Lake Charles. Although they lost every tree in their yard and sustained damage to the house, the good news is that no one was hurt or lost, and most of their belongings were undamaged. But I remember sitting in Portland glued to the news during both events, and being especially stunned at what took place in New Orleans following Katrina. In the United States? In our lifetime? It just seemed unthinkable.

Last week Zeitoun, the new book by Dave Eggers, arrived in the store. It tells the Katrina story and its unbelievable aftermath through the eyes of one family, the Zeitouns. Here's the book description below:

"When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous 47-year-old Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy an American who converted to Islam and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research - in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria."

Tulane History Professor Douglas Brinkley (and author of The Great Deluge, also about Katrina) says of this book, "Zeitoun is a poignant, haunting, etheral story about New Orleans in peril. Eggers has bottled up the feeling of post-Katrina despair better than anyone else. This is a simple, beautiful book with a lingering radiance."

I gobbled this book up. Experiencing Katrina through the eyes of an individual family really makes it all seem more real than the images I had watched on the TV news. Now I'm hungry for more. Reading Zeitoun reminded me that I have another book that I bought shortly after Katrina: 1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina, by Chris Rose, a New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist, which recounts the first four harrowing months of life in New Orleans after Katrina. It is described as a roller coaster ride of observations, commentary, emotions, tragedy, and even humor. So that's where I'm going next.

I'm particularly excited about two more books about Katrina coming out soon. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, by Josh Neufeld, is a graphic novel that portrays both the undeniable horrors and the humanitarianism triggered by Hurricane Katrina by following six New Orleanians from the hours before Katrina strikes to its aftermath. That book will be published in hardcover on August 18th. The second book, which is out now, is coming out in paperback September 1: City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza, is a novel that tells the Katrina story through the eyes of two New Orleans families, one black and one white.

But until those two are published, I highly recommend reading Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, who has also written What is the What, a fictionalized telling of the story of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and is the founder and editor of McSweeney's, an independent publishing house based in San Francisco.

Sunshine on my shoulder...

While our resident blogger, Sally, is yukking it up at the beach this weekend (love ya, Sal!), I am stuck indoors on this amazingly beautiful, sunny day, staring longingly at the passersby on Broadway. But, fair blog readers, weep not for me yet--there are far more unpleasant ways to spend a lazy Sunday than chatting with customers about good reads at Broadway Books.

Speaking of which, here is my latest graphic novel pick: Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw. This hefty sized tome is the story of Maggie and David Loony, who are getting a divorce after 40 years of marriage. Their children, now grown, deal with the news in varying ways. Dennis, the oldest, takes the news the hardest, moving from anger to denial to eventual acceptance. Claire, the middle daughter, is more realistic, having experienced her own divorce and single-motherhood, and Peter, the 26-year-old slacker baby of the family just wants to get laid. Shaw tackles the subject and his characters' emotions masterfully, and the book is both movingly simple and painfully complex. I'll admit it...I totally cried at the end...in the store...again. It's the perfect read for a warm, sunny day. Or a cold, cloudy day. Or even an "Ooohh, look, the sun! No, wait, it's gone...wait! There it is again... oh, no, it's gone again" kind of day.

P.S. Anyone who feels like coming down and visiting me at the store today gets a free cookie.

Kaspar by Diane Obomsawin

The story of Kaspar Hauser is mysterious and fascinating, and one with which I was previously unfamiliar until I read Diane Obomsawin's compelling graphic novel, Kaspar. On May 28, 1828, a sixteen-year-old boy appeared on the streets of Nuremberg with nothing but the clothes on his back and a mysterious note addressed to the captain of the 4th squadron of the 6th cavalry regiment. The boy could speak only a few words and could offer no clue to his identity. The note suggested that he had, until that day, never stepped foot out of his house, having been fed and taught some basic lessons by his unknown guardian, the writer of the note. As Kaspar learned to speak, he related his story--he claimed to have been raised in a dark, tiny cell with absolutely no human contact except for a man in black who kept his face hidden. Truly, the story only gets weirder from here, and Obomsawin's book does a fantastic job of relating Kaspar's strange and much talked about life and death with "minimalist grayscale panels and the simplest of line work." She bases much of her book on Kaspar's own writings so the reader is granted rare access into the workings of a very bizarre, misunderstood, and possibly mentally ill individual. It's juicy stuff, to be sure, and the mystery of Kaspar Hauser still confounds historians to this day.

Moresukine: Uploaded Weekly from Tokyo

As promised, I'm back with another graphic novel recommendation (this is Jennie for those of you who missed the earlier posting I wrote while Sally was away at bookselling school). I'm a big fan of social experiments, which explains why Moresukine: Uploaded Weekly from Tokyo by Dirk Schwieger is my graphic novel pick this week. Schwieger lived in Tokyo for a couple of years and while he was there he kept a comics blog. He invited readers of his blog to write in and submit missions for him to complete that would take him out of his expat comfort zone and introduce him to the multi-faceted conundrum wrapped in an enigma that is modern Japanese culture. For 6 months he took on every challenge that was posed, regardless of how dangerous, weird, gross, pointless, boring or uncomfortable it was. He then drew short comics pieces about each assignment. We join Dirk as he risks his life to taste the potentially poisonous fugu, checks out the local love hotel, visits the architectural wonder that is the Studio Ghibli Museum (this is one I'm jealous of), and goes on a host of other strange, eye-opening adventures. Schwieger's humorous commentary as he relates each journey captures both the exoticism and utter normalcy of urban Japan. The book is the size and shape of a Moleskine notebook (the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin!) and is a steal at only $15.95.

Shaun Tan's Tales From Outer Suburbia

Since our favorite blogger, Sally, is on vacay (well, okay, she's not really on vacay--she's actually braving the wilds of Salt Lake City to attend the American Bookseller Association's mid-winter institute in order to learn how to better serve you, our lovely, loyal customers) she has asked me (Jennie) to guest spot for the next few days. And, since I happen to love graphic novels, it is likely that they will be the subject of my posts. If you have yet to check out our graphic novel section, perhaps it is time to break out of that reading rut and try something new. I'm always happy to make suggestions...

That being said, my current recommendation is Shaun Tan's Tales From Outer Suburbia (Scholastic, $19.99). Tan is the author/illustrator of the amazingly beautiful and moving The Arrival (which is also worth taking a gander at if you happen to be browsing for something different). Tales is a series of illustrated vignettes detailing fantastical little slices of life from suburbia. The characters and plots that inhabit his strange universe may seem unusual and foreign, but the emotions they arouse will most certainly be familiar. Now, I should tell you this--I am not generally a crier. Sure, I can be sentimental, but rarely do I allow the expulsion of salty moisture to leak from my ducts. However, I will admit to you that one paticular story in this book made me bust out into a serious blubber-fest. (What's even worse is that I was reading it at the store, and there were customers around!--which just goes to show you how affected I was by it.) It's not so much that the story was sad, but that it was just incredibly moving in the simplicity of its message. Still makes me feel a little misty just thinking about it...

My point (circuitous as it may seem) is that it is a spectacularly awesome book that is worth a trip to Broadway Books. And, it's appropriate for big and little people of all ages. What a great deal.

Good Comics for Young Kids

Graphic novels are all the rage these days, and there are certainly good ones for kids, as well as kid-targeted manga. But a new publisher is really taking the whole reading/visual literacy thing seriously. Toon Books -- an imprint founded by Francoise Mouly, art director of The New Yorker (who also happens to be married to Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Maus and a comics pioneer) -- publishes titles for children in kindergarten through third grade that were developed and tested with the hands-on help of teachers and reading specialists. All of the vocabulary has been vetted for appropriate degree of difficulty. While some adults might turn up their noses at the thought of buying "comics" for their kids to read, literacy -- espcially in this age -- isn't just about being able to understand the written word but also about visual literacy, and comics can help develop visual literacy. So give them a try! We have several titles in stock, including one by Art Spiegelman called Jack and the Box. These books are nicely produced and thoughtfully developed and would make great gifts for beginning readers.