Sticks and Stones

THREE RIVERS PRESS, 128 PAGES, $13.95

STICKS AND STONES IS not the most colorful of Peter Kuper's books, but it may be his best. His own invention of a spray-paint-and-stencil method works to impressive advantage here, because like the artists of film noir, he has given himself over to gray shadings that even the most brilliant use of color cannot replicate.

In 128 eight-by-eight pages-10 of them in color-we very gradually learn about the origin and course of empire. A leviathan emerging from the primeval volcanic rock is informed to his surprise that little (i.e., physically lesser) people are willing, almost eager, to serve him. There may well be a little David somewhere, intent on slaying Goliath, but secular Kuper is not going to offer us any religious or folk message of suffering's redemption. Instead we have a replay of the main reason that the civilizations of antiquity collapsed: deforestation. The resulting catastrophic flood, not just biblical, stands here for all the familiar related consequences, from fevers to infighting over badly diminished resources. Doesn't anyone ever learn from anything?

What interests Kuper, like the darkest and most political of the expressionist wood-cut artists-and, for that matter, the breakthrough 15th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch-is the pitilessness of the process by which the joys and beauties of ordinary life are uprooted and crushed for no purpose but might and its symbols. Our rulers pull the temple down upon themselves, with all of us standing hopelessly around inside.

Perhaps Kuper seemed more hopeful a couple decades ago, or perhaps Sticks and Stones is only one of his moods. He says that he wanted to create something that could speak to his seven-year-old daughter as well as to the public. No children's book of mine was ever so stark, and yet I can see the point. Kid, things are going to be tough, make no mistake about it, but not even an imperial Goliath can last forever.

PAUL BUHLE