Starred Review for Publishers Weekly (Thu Apr 28 00:00:00 CDT 2022)

Famed innovator Eisner showed the creators of modern comics what a potentially rich medium they were working with. In particular, he used the term "graphic novel" to sell <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">A Contract with God (1978), a collection of interrelated comics stories about residents in a Jewish tenement section of New York. He returned to that territory in <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">A Life Force (1988), showing one man's uncertain progress, and in <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Dropsie Avenue (1995), an historical panorama of the whole neighborhood. Printed together for the first time in this volume, the works reinforce each other beautifully. Eisner's virtuoso art always has been admired, but his writing sometimes has been disparaged as thin and sentimental. Over the span of these three books, though, emotions jostle and balance each other; sometimes the stories seem upbeat, sometimes fatalistic. The characters frequently are defeated in the short term but always yearning for more than their surroundings offer. In any case, Eisner's illustrations are superb: water drenches a man walking alone at night in a thunderstorm; a fat housewife athletically performs a "heart attack" right after her husband has collapsed with a real one; aerial cityscapes expand; and every possible expression flickers over the characters' faces. This is an important, wonderful book. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Nov.)

ALA Booklist

Besides his 1940s Spirit stories and more recent graphic novels depicting American Jewish life, Eisner (1917-2005) produced instructional strips for the army and other clients. In The Plot, completed shortly before his death, he employed his mastery of the medium to once again educate readers, this time on a subject of personal concern, the anti-Semitic nineteenth-century forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be a plan by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Although debunked long ago, Protocols continues to incite new generations of the gullible. By using comics to depict its true provenance as a publication of Russia's secret police to deflect criticism of the government, Eisner hoped to effectively reach audiences most susceptible to its bigoted propaganda. If it is unlikely that the book will achieve Eisner's intentions--those who want to believe outlandish slander may do so despite how thoroughly or vividly it is refuted--The Plot lives as a vivid confirmation of Eisner's belief in the comics medium's potency for simply, effectively conveying ideas.

School Library Journal

Gr 10 Up-Published posthumously, this history of the Protocols is based on new evidence from the post-Soviet opening of the Russian archives. Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian aristocrat exiled in France, wrote the work for the secret police, to convince Czar Nicholas II that Jews were behind the political unrest in Russia and to persuade him to abandon liberal reforms. Golovinski plagiarized The Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1864), a satirical essay by French attorney Maurice Joly, implying that Napoleon III's plans for France were Machiavellian. Following the stories of Joly and Golovinski, the scene shifts to Constantinople, where a Russian exile offers to sell copies of the Dialogues and the Protocols to a reporter from the London Times . A comparison of the two documents leads to the publication of an article in 1921 exposing the Protocols as a forgery. Despite this revelation, it continued to be used, from the Nazis to Henry Ford to more contemporary hate groups and governments. Eisner appears as a character: researching his book, discussing why the Protocols survive despite repeated debunking, and talking to college students who distribute it. The artwork is occasionally over-the-top; one of Golovinski's superiors is a crazed, Rasputin-like caricature. The side-by-side comparison of sections of the Dialogues and the Protocols is so long that it risks losing readers completely. Despite these flaws, the book is well researched and, for the most part, accomplishes Eisner's goal of making the information available to a wider audience by using a graphic format. Sandy Freund, Richard Byrd Library, Fairfax County, VA