All The Answers - Ultimate Guide for Problem Solving & Decision Making | Perfect for Students, Professionals & Everyday Life Challenges

I just got Michael Kupperman's graphic memoir about his father two days ago and couldn't put it down. It's a fast read, but I may still not be done with it.In the story of Joel Kupperman's early fame as a math prodigy on the radio and TV show Quiz Kids, there are a lot of celebrities mentioned from a bygone era. You can learn a lot about popular culture from the 1940s and 50s by looking up the names mentioned. I know already that the episode of Quiz Kids from 50s television is on the Internet Archive and so is Eddie Cantor's radio show. I'm a little bit curious about the movie Joel Kupperman was in and whether that is out there somewhere too. I can keep returning to it as a culture history otaku and get a new lead each time.The lead I should be exploring, however, is a deeper cultural significance about the changing image of Jewish Americans before and after World War II. Having grown up with a father damaged by early celebrity, Michael Kupperman did research to find the silver lining to a psychologically damaging experience by clarifying how the quiz kids normalized American Jews as admirable, bright young people selling war bonds after Henry Ford's anti-semitic publications had previously increased hate toward Jewish people.The book also touches upon the history of controlled and rigged entertainment game shows and should interest game show fans. Kupperman places emphasis upon the Quiz Kids show being controlled by encouraging Joel Kupperman to read books that questions would be drawn from, but he wasn't given the questions ahead of time and certainly did complicated math live on the air. He refused to participate in a later show that he found to be rigged, and he walked away from winning dishonestly. It is interesting to learn that the reveal of rigged gameshows profoundly effected Joel Kupperman's life and led him to teach philosophy and write books on ethics.Lastly, this book is a cautionary warning to any parents who want to turn their children's gifts into a career by being stage parents. The graphic novel as a medium is excellent at framing small moments, and here it shows a controlling mother, an overwhelmed child who doesn't enjoy pleasing people as much as she does, and then reactionary avoidance later in the grown child's life after meeting people who didn't enjoy the media message his mother had forced him to support. I found it easy to empathize with both father and son Kupperman and was sad to follow how the family's psychology had effects passed down from generation to generation. If you notice a dark joke from Michael Kupperman on his Twitter, send him some kind words. He has a brooding intellectual comic mind, though very self aware and visibly trying to heal the controlling or aloof influences of past generations by showing support for his son's artwork in his tweets. I hope the future is bright and loving for them.Michael Kupperman's art has a meditative and also troubled feeling to it at he tells his father's story. There was one panel that reminded me of the Teshigahara film The Face of Another, showing his father trying to blend in in a crowd after having grown up and found fame to be an unwanted obstacle. The panel is inked in black and white, but Joel Kupperman is a bright face due to having thinner lines than all the other people depicted. It's very subtle but emphasizes his withdrawal from notoriety and the passive lack of connection between him and other humans.The importance of being aware of how we connect and disconnect with other humans, even in our own family, was my ultimate personal takeaway from this book. I identify with the goal of trying to get the whole history from a parent before that library burns down in dementia or heart failure, and there aren't always as many news clippings and stories from other people to go on. Perhaps All the Answers doesn't have all of the answers, but Michael Kupperman gave his best effort.