New & Current Releases
Archives: A-Z By Title
Archives: A-Z By Author
Advanced Search

All-Time High Scores
Best Of 2006
Best Of 2005
Best Of 2004
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Books In Our Forums

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed books.

In The Shadow Of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman


6.6

based on 16 reviews
read critic reviews
how did we calculate this?

based on 3 votes
read user comments
rate this book

Compare prices at pricegrabber.com

Buy it at powells.com

Buy it at amazon.com

Buy it at amazon.co.uk

Official Publisher Site

Cartoonist Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the Holocaust series 'Maus,' offers a graphic and angry look at the events of, and following, September 11, 2001. The 42-page, full-color book is printed on heavy cardstock in an oversized format meant to echo the size of early newspaper comics.

Pantheon, 42 pages
09/07/2004
$19.95

ISBN: 0375423079

Nonfiction
Current Events & Politics

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Boston Globe Carlo Wolff

Small but eloquent comfort, it's original, provocative, and populist art.

Publishers Weekly

This is a powerful and quirky work of visual storytelling by a master comics artist.

Salon Scott Thill

[A] must-have collection of hard-hitting, self-deprecating strips on life during wartime.

San Francisco Chronicle Kenneth Baker

Spiegelman interweaves pain, sadness, dread, laughter and outrage in this book as perhaps only his medium permits.

The Guardian Aili McConnon

In the Shadow of No Towers is most compelling as it charts the changing memory of 9/11.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Baker

A wrenching, poignant, angry reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. [7 Sep 2004]

The New York Times Book Review David Hajdu

An odd, thin but robust hybrid of a book... vigorously unorthodox.

The Onion A.V. Club Tasha Robinson

By openly displaying his influences, Spiegelman tips his hand a little too much, and by dividing his attention, he takes some of the bite out of his primary subject, which has already been bitten half to death over the past three years.

USA Today Christopher Theokas

No Towers is provocative and partisan. But it's also very personal. Spiegelman offers his fears, his horror and his anger for everyone to see.

Village Voice Joseph McElroy

Jokes grotesque with mixed and blurred antihero ironies and displaced body parts are crammed into cartoon windows like dwelling places for our city subconscious.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

"No Towers" is ultimately a fragmentary, unfinished piece: brilliant at times, but scattershot, incomplete and bizarrely truncated.

New York Observer Adam Begley

Mr. Spiegelman dazzles with his artistry: He flashes his wit; he shows off his remarkable flair for design. But he never hooks his reader, mostly because he hasn't found a way to tap into the tragedy of the attack.

Flak Lindsay Nordell

This is the problem with "No Towers": Anyone old enough to read it is old enough to remember its events and to have taken all those jarring images to heart -- so much so that Spiegelman's images cannot dislodge our own.

The Independent Gordon Burn

A scattershot yet oddly constrained performance.

The New Republic Wyatt Mason

Its frenetic marrying of styles, while it keeps a reader's attention, also produces an estrangement from the distress that it describes: it sets the reader adrift.

Washington Post Douglas Wolk

He's venting in all directions rather than making a point, and his jokes are pure lead.

The average user rating for this book is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Erin M gave it a10:
This book is amazing! It captures the readers attention in all areas of the book. Art Spigelman isn't afraid to show his political thoughts as his political theme isn't subtle.

Discuss this book in our forums

Return to top of page

In The Shadow Of No Towers by Art Spiegelman

In The Shadow Of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman