Starred review from April 4, 2016
Celebrated Italian comic artist Igort
(5 Is the Perfect Number) has produced an impressive work of investigative journalism spanning nearly a century of brutality in the former Soviet Union, little of it known in the West. Although the layouts and citations are occasionally muddled, this does not diminish the stark horrors depicted. The first section recounts detailed eyewitness accounts of the Holodomor, a Stalin-sanctioned artificial famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. Although Russian influence kept the Holodomor from being labeled a genocide by the UN, evidence of mass graves and cannibalism tell a very different story. Igort draws these and other atrocities with an expressionist style, highlighting the destruction of hope up to the present day. The second part focuses on Russia’s war crimes against the Chechen people and attacks on its own citizens, including the assassination of journalist Anastasia Baburova. A postscript details how Russia murdered its own soldiers during the Ukrainian war of 2014. Throughout, Igort’s art demands the reader’s attention, making it hard to look away from the gut-wrenching truths presented.
March 15, 2016
A masterful mix of journalistic reporting and graphic art. The plainspoken title offers little hint of the devastation within, as the Italian artist Igort (5 is the Perfect Number, 2003, etc.) focuses his considerable talents on 20th-century atrocities that bled into the 21st, as Russian totalitarianism and seemingly ceaseless war have made a mockery of human rights. The first notebook is more of an oral history, as the interviews recorded by the artist testify to the horrors of famine in the Ukraine--sanctioned by Josef Stalin--and human resilience in the face of hunger, disease, deportation, and exile. "What emerged was a programmatic plan that, by military might, crushed the Ukraine, obliterated its independence movements, destroyed its identity," writes Igort, followed by the communist edict: "Ukrainian culture doesn't exist! In order to carry out cultural and physical genocide they had to follow a plan defined down to the last detail." The second notebook works more like a piece of investigative reporting. "I spent five years in Ukraine, Russia, and Siberia, trying to understand, to document," writes the author. "What was the Soviet Union? What was it like to have lived through this experience that had lasted over seventy years?" He also tells the stories of other journalists who had tried to document the atrocities and who had paid with their lives. He illuminates the life and work of Anna Politkovskaya, a writer who saw herself as a truth-teller in the lineage of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and whose writing put her in grave danger. "Her empathy, her ability to listen and share, took her beyond the limits of her own method," writes Igort. "She had shed the journalist's distance and was left simply a human being. And that was her death sentence." As well reported and written as these notebooks are, the visual artistry reinforces the impact, with a richness and evocation of emotional detail that transcend words. A work that ranks with the best journalism and the finest graphic artistry.
COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
July 1, 2016
Death and painful ways to die take center stage in these disjointed, horrifying vignettes spanning the 1930s through the current decade. The first section focuses on the Holodomor, Russian dictator Joseph Stalin's sanctioned manmade famine in Ukraine, while the second half covers the last 20 years of Chechnya atrocities, and the postscript returns to Ukraine and considers Vladimir Putin's annexation of Crimea. Italian cartoonist Igort (5 Is the Perfect Number) spent five years in Ukraine and Russia gathering stories of oppression. He also consulted newspaper articles and other primary sources, although some are incompletely referenced. Several older Ukrainians stand out in the book's first part, while murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya is featured later. The grinding misery and torture endured by people, from soldiers to peasants, is drawn with fine-line pen, lightly realistic with a grotesque expressionism, and colored with parched tans through ochres suffused with grays and sparked by red. Not a documentary, nor didactic referenced history, this work bears unforgettable witness to the courage and resilience of the human spirit and also to the depths of cruelty that people inflict on one another. VERDICT For teens through adults following human rights issues and international affairs.--MC
Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 15, 2016
This deeply affecting title combines two collections by Italian author and illustrator Igort. The Ukrainian Notebooks contains stories and interviews of those who survived government-sanctioned genocide in 1932, during which up to 12-million ethnic Ukrainians starved to death. The Russian Notebooks focuses on the murder of journalist and activist Anna Politkovskaya, who was an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin until her death. Not for the faint of heart, these two collections lay completely bare the tremendous volume of human suffering in Russian history. The Ukrainian Notebooks, in particular, is harrowing. Filled with shadowy, ghostlike portraits, the panels can be a relentless litany of horror on the individual and the collective levels. Igort uses a combination of narrative text to provide context and small panels filled with worn colors and simple line drawings to tell the stories. He is at his best with the full-page, pen-and-ink portraits that capture the humanity of his subjects. Naturally, this would be great fit for graphic novel fans, but history readers would also be intrigued.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)