A Most Imperfect Union

May 12, 2014
Following up the creators’ Latino USA: A Cartoon History (2000), this book demonstrates that comics may be the ideal form to express contrarian thinking—in this case, alternate views of American history. One panel shows a straight portrait of John Quincy Adams penning an 1811 passage that justifies U.S. domination of all North America based on “divine providence,” juxtaposed with a modern Latino who observes, “And you Gringos wonder why everyone hates you....” Throughout the book, Amherst professor Stavans and L.A. cartoonist Alcaraz cast their skeptical, sarcastic eyes on the accepted notion of America’s steady progress as capably managed by upright white males. Alcaraz gets the point across using the hard-to-miss icons of editorial cartooning with a clean, cartoony style. One disadvantage of the contrarian approach is that it seems to amount to a random smattering of disparaging comments. But that’s the point: our history is more complicated than most Americans suppose, shaped by a more diverse swarm of people than we want to imagine.

May 15, 2014
Prolific intellectual Stavans and collaborative artist Alcaraz follow up and expand their first exploration of American culture (Latino USA: A Cartoon History, 2000, etc.) to examine the secret history of the United States of America.Stavans and Alcaraz offer an opposing view to the sanitized history most of us were taught in elementary school classrooms. As a Mexican-born Jewish immigrant who moved to the United States in the 1980s, Stavans has a passionate response to the erroneousness of American history. "The past is elastic," he writes. "Its parts shrink and expand depending on who is looking at them and when. Because of this, it's important to take a contrarian's viewpoint, to be wary of what the French call idees fixes-lazy unquestioned truths." From this ambitious beginning, Stavans and Alcaraz track the arc of history, from Christopher Columbus' unlikely enterprise to find the new world (he didn't) to the acrimonious relationship between the pilgrims and Native peoples all the way through to our messy, dangerous post-9/11 world. Stavans and Alcaraz examine social movements, pop culture, politics, crime, war and economics, with pithy side comments from the aforementioned peanut gallery. Since it casts its net so wide, it can feel very out of tune from time to time, although Alcaraz's amusing pen-and-ink style ably captures most of the book's famous subjects. Stavans and Alcaraz also aren't afraid to poke a little fun at themselves: "You interject too much out-of-place information! The readers are all confused now," cracks Alcaraz. Nonetheless, well-read students are unlikely to find too many surprises here. While it makes for an entertaining afternoon, it's still mostly a surface-level history lesson with a few iconoclastic opinions added in for spice.A history book that wants to be Howard Zinn's A People's History of American Empire but comes off more like Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the United States with more savvy jokes.

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September 15, 2014
Professor Stavans and syndicated cartoonist Alcaraz first teamed up to create Latino USA: A Cartoon History (2000), which was both an innovative look at history and a unique foray into graphic nonfiction. Their new sequential art deconstruction of the American mythos, which arises from political and social histories as well as evolving technologies and ethnic-awareness movements, is looser but no less compelling. Set up as a conversation among Stavans, Alcaraz, and a fictional movie director and political pundit, the text and panels explore Pilgrim ideologies, westward expansion, isolationist and superpower postures on the world stage, and many other topics, including whether Huckleberry Finn can withstand cleansing of its n-word, CNN's revolutionizing of news-consumption habits, and the Supreme Court's support of the Affordable Care Act. Alcaraz' bold and brash black-and-white cartoons are hyperbolic while informative, and the full package should give students of history pause, particularly as they consider critical questions regarding well-established facts of history. Edgy, informative, and visually engaging, this would be a good fit for visual learners and iconoclasts.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)