An engrossing chronicle of a well-regarded Batman show.
Miller offers the third volume of interviews on animated Batman TV series, this time tackling The New Batman Adventures.
As longtime Warner Bros. casting and voice director Andrea Romano points out in her foreword to this latest oral history of the animated Batman franchise, some shows just seemed to come together by magic, with the perfect collection of talent at the perfect time. Virtually all the writers, directors, storyboarders, artists, and actors interviewed in these pages seem to agree that this was the case for Batman: The Animated Series (the subject of the previous two volumes, which ran from 1992 to ’95 on Fox) and its successor, The New Batman Adventures (which aired on The WB from 1997 to ’99). As in previous volumes, there are dozens of photos and full-color production stills, as well as an annotated episode list, complete with standout quotes, as when Star Wars’ Mark Hamill, voicing the Joker, says, “May the floss be with you” during a scene in a dentist’s office. The New Batman Adventures only lasted for a single season, but a great many people were involved in making it the masterpiece many acknowledge it to be, from its brilliant voice actors—including the great Kevin Conroy as Batman—to its showrunners, almost all of whom reflect on their experiences here. The subject matter even extends to ancillary Batman appearances in shows such as World’s Finest and Superman, and, as in previous volumes, every discussion goes into granular and engaging detail about the nuts and bolts of the animation industry. Miller is a skilled interviewer, adept at getting great quotes from his subjects, many of whom display an appealing humility; for example, Diane Pershing, the voice of villain Poison Ivy, mentions that although she interpreted the character her own way, “somebody else could interpret it in a different way, [and] it’d be just as valid.” Hamill, referring to the hit 1989 live-action Batman film, blurts out, “What kind of fool follows Jack Nicholson in anything?!” There’s also a touching section of tributes to Conroy, who died in 2022.
An engrossing chronicle of a well-regarded Batman show.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798887710952
Page Count: 632
Publisher: BearManor Media
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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