Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Crumb, by Dan Nadel (Scribner). In this diligently researched biography, the graphic novel finds its forebear in the cartoonist Robert Crumb. The book chronicles Crumb’s aberrant life and career, from his early success as the “cartoon voice of the underground” in the nineteen-sixties, when his visual style became emblematic of the counterculture, through his illustrations of the Book of Genesis, in the early two-thousands. Nadel balances admiration for Crumb’s craft with critical evaluations of the artist’s racist caricatures and overt misogyny. What emerges is a complicated and occasionally grotesque portrait of an artist whose “id was out on the page,” and who, Nadel argues, laid the groundwork for a range of successful graphic masterpieces, including Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.”

When the City Stopped, by Robert Snyder (Three Hills). The real-life experiences of New Yorkers during the COVID-19 outbreak are at the heart of this collection of as-told-to stories. Snyder highlights the actions, big and small, that people took to help the city survive, including medical personnel who collaborated across hospitals to find health-care solutions, and bus drivers who stayed on their routes. Snyder writes that, while working on the book, he “glimpsed a little-recognized truth of the pandemic: in the days when New York felt abandoned and besieged, it was saved from the bottom up.” He posits that remembering the sacrifices of the types of people he features—teachers, retail workers, E.M.T.s—“is the way to prepare for a better future.”

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