brief book reviews: Unflattening

In Unflattening, Nick Sousanis writes that we need to “discover new ways of seeing, to open spaces for possibilities. It is about finding different perspectives.”

Stereoscopic vision reveals “that a single, ‘true’ perspective is false.”

Comics “allow for the integration and incorporation of multiple modes and signs and symbols.”

We all have “the capacity to host a multiplicity of worlds inside us,” so “we emerge with the possibility to become something different.”

We’re like the drones in Lang’s Metropolis, and like puppets who discover we have strings, and like the two-dimensional figures in Abbott’s Flatland.

There’s even a quote from Kahlil Gibran.

The whole argument is, more or less, contained in this image. If all this strikes you as profound or provocative, maybe you’ll like the book.

more on visual criticism

Following this earlier post, here’s another example of visualized criticism.

What do the images add to this — what shall we call it — little essay? There aren't many words here. Does that make this analysis superficial? If the space taken up by the images was filled with words instead, would the analysis likely be deeper? What do the images do?

(Utopia isn't a novel, by the way.)

I saw that book review. . .

This is Alison Bechdel's review in the NYT of Jane Vandenburgh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century:

You can see a larger version here.

Why shouldn't there be more of this kind of thing? I can imagine that there would be many books — not all, not most, but many — that would be very well served by graphic reviews. (Along these lines, see my review of the graphic version of The 9/11 Report.)

 UPDATE: Thanks to commenter Mark, here's Ward Sutton's review of Roth's latest. It's a lot less substantive and useful than Bechdel's work: there are only a handful of words, and the images add no information. Bechdel's words and images work together much better and provide a denser and more meaningful experience for the reader.