R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art

R.I.P.: Memorial Wall Art Martha Cooper and Joseph Sciorra (Henry Holt, $19.95) Picture a war memorial, and you probably think of something cold, gray, and chiseled out of stone. But the memorials to those who have died in today's inner-city battlegrounds often look very different: colorful, dizzyingly busy, and placed not in sacrosanct gardens but in crowded playgrounds or on the sides of buildings. This book collects photographs of more than 100 New York City-area memorial murals, most of them commissioned by friends and family of young African-Americans and Latinos who have fallen victim to everything from gang violence to asthma attacks. These are hauntingly direct images: portraits of the deceased depicted with red roses, heartfelt poetry and prose, and symbols of favorite possessions (like a red Nova). This is not art that needs to be heavily analyzed or interpreted to discover its meaning. The meaning is all too clear. A- --Erica Kornberg