Book reviews: ‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ and ‘Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto’

‘Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography’ by Joshua Kendall

The new Garry Trudeau biography is, compared with the comic strip he’s known for, “not as sophisticated, in tone and content,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. But while it’s merely “a meat-and-potatoes biography,” it “has a good story to tell,” and “I devoured it in two or three sittings, as if it were an ideal bag of popcorn.” Trudeau, now 77, is a hero to many because, beginning with the first syndicated appearance of Doonesbury in 1970, he “dragged a knowing hippie sensibility onto the playground of the comics pages.” For decades, his strips were “a daily confirmation of one’s sanity,” and he’s been just as sharp since slowing in 2014 to a Sunday-only publication schedule. He is, as this book reveals, a short guy who shot up at age 17 but who “never forgot what being a short guy was like.”

Author Joshua Kendall traces Trudeau’s life back to its origins — “a childhood marked by both immense privilege and a quiet, defining trauma,” said David Smith in The Guardian. Trudeau grew up in an upstate New York town essentially built by his great-grandfather, but his mother left the family when Garry was 10, and he battled depression and towering bullies when he was sent away to prep school. But an inspiring teacher helped him express himself through art, and after he entered Yale in 1966, he started a comic strip in the student paper that evolved into Doonesbury. By the mid-1970s, he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and was carried in newspapers with a total readership of 60 million, and he’d graduated from lampooning jocks and preppies to calling out Richard Nixon’s criminality. In 1980, he married Today show co-host Jane Pauley.

“Kendall reminds us of the many times that Doonesbury was more than just a comic strip,” said Alex Beam in The Boston Globe. A moving chapter details Trudeau’s deep immersion in the experiences of wounded combat veterans, a group he honored when one of the strip’s original characters, the footballer B.D., lost a leg fighting in the Iraq War. At other times, Trudeau has drawn anger or censorship, as when he created the funny pages’ first openly gay character or spoofed new state limits on abortions. Though Kendall persuaded the famously reclusive Trudeau to answer some biographical questions, the author offers little insight about his subject’s emotional life, leaving “a yawning hole” in his account. Still, the book is “a warm and fuzzy romp for Baby Boomers” and “a perfect biography for Trudeau: respectful, informative, and none too intrusive — just the way he would want it.”

‘Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto’ by MJ Corey

In the preface of her new book, MJ Corey offers a note of apology for pouring so much energy into analyzing a family that’s famously famous for being famous, and for little else, said Megan Garber in The Atlantic. “The rest of Corey’s book, however, is unapologetic, and rightfully so: The Kardashians matter, Corey suggests, because of who they are but also because of who we are.” It’s the viewing habits of the rest of us, after all, that have turned sisters Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, Kendall, and Kylie—plus mother Kris—into ubiquitous and persistently influential presences in 21st-century culture. The Kardashians have become billionaires on the fuel of our attention, and Corey, who for years has been applying scholarly analysis to the family in her popular Kardashian Kolloquium social media posts, has written a book that “reads less as a biography of one clan than as a study of the culture that elevated it.”

To argue its points, the book “deploys a litany of canonical media theorists and philosophers,” said Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker. Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan are invoked to show how the Kardashians shrewdly used media formats both old and new to build an enduring following. Kim, now 45, has been particularly adept at amassing attention, building her fame off the 2007 leak of a sex tape to become a billionaire entrepreneur whose image still fills social media feeds. “Corey is at her best when parsing the ways in which the Kardashians resonate with their audience.” Alas, Dekonstructing the Kardashians can be “a frustratingly frenetic and recursive book, whose agglomeration of details doesn’t always amount to a deeper narrative.”

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Yes, the book jumps around, said Molly B. Nash in the Chicago Review of Books, but “it is an organized chaos, one that reflects the progression of this multifaceted matriarchal family into the heart of the cultural zeitgeist.” Corey’s “incredibly ambitious” study takes in all the ways the Kardashians have harvested attention, all the ways they’ve infiltrated various consumer spheres, and all the ways our responses to their evolving act reveal shifts in our relationship to mass media. “Whether we’ve wanted to or not, we’ve been keeping up.”