Opinion

REQUIRED READING

Bat-Manga!

The Secret History of Batman in Japan

by Chip Kidd (Pantheon)

Holy sake, Batman! When Adam West donned the Caped Crusader costume for TV in the mid-1960s, the Japanese went bananas for Batman, too. Original stories were published there, in Japanese, for a year. Now, they’ve been collected, translated and republished, along with colorful photos of Japanese Batman-abilia.

“What’s so great about these comics is that they take Batman and Robin back to the days when their adventures were actually fun,” Chip Kidd tells Required Reading. “But they are also very, very cool, mainly because of the vintage manga emphasis on speed, streamlining and late-’60s Japanese modernist chic. “Plus, artist-writer Jiro Kuwata came up with villains that were far weirder and off-the-charts than their US counterparts.” Those villains include: Lord Death-Man, Karnak the Gorilla Super-Genius, Dr. Faceless, the Man Who Quit Being Human and Go-Go the Magician.

Casanova

Actor, Lover, Priest, Spy

by Ian Kelly

(Tarcher/Penguin)

Brit writer Kelly, who counts food among his frequent subjects, tells us his book is “a look for the first time at Casanova as an important food writer . . . and devotee of the Kaballah.” (Hear that, Madonna?) Kelly includes some recipes – the famous Venetian, he writes, sprinkled his spaghetti with cinnamon and sugar. As for Casanova, if he lived in the 21st century, Kelly tells us, “He would love reality TV, in that he adored putting all classes and types of people together – and watching the mayhem.”

New York Nocturne

The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850 to 1950

by William Chapman Sharpe

(Princeton University Press)

Art, nighttime and urban life make for a combustible – and seductive – combination. The author, an English professor at Barnard, examines the city through artists, photographers, journalists and authors, and how it changed, starting with the introduction of the gas-light in the 1850s, when New York night life really began.