A unique book with more than a few profound philosophical moments that evoke peace and foster emotional healing.
Readers see the many faces of adult orphan grief in Garwood-Jones’ adult picture book.
The five stages of grief, as conceptualized by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, get an expansive remix, complete with renderings of subjects in the throes of various distilled moments of coping mechanism flux. In this cleverly conceived book, faithfully nuanced caricatures, or stagers (a term taken from Shakespearean theater protocol and a play on Kübler-Ross’ stages), mirror the ways grief manifests in our actions across 41 chapters with titles that are sometimes familiar (“The Shell Shocked,” “The Pity Partiers,” “The Addicted”) and other times unexpected (“The Dog Moms,” “The Closeted,” “The Narcissists”). Over a dozen stand-alone quotes on grief by noted people are interspersed between, as well. An eggplant-purple color scheme is used purposefully to unify the sweeping range of emotions between disparate poles of intensity, associated with red, and calm, associated with blue. To “capture how we are coping, moment to moment, year after year, after a big loss” is the author’s mission statement, and for the most part, it is easy to draw a connection between the coping mechanism attributed to the various stagers. In some chapters, however, the correlation between the subject as portrayed in the accompanying text and the person’s stage of grief is tenuous. A chapter entitled “The Dicks,” for instance, includes a portrait of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and two other men, all espousing questionable ideologies. They may well be orphaned adults, but their personalities can’t be boiled down to a reaction to grief. Midway through, a quote by writer and actor Amy Sedaris, “Assume everyone is grieving,” reorients readers in light of such less apparent examples of how an adult orphan might be grappling with loss. Finding oneself, family, friends, or others within these pages makes it a perfectly contemplative coping tool.
A unique book with more than a few profound philosophical moments that evoke peace and foster emotional healing.Pub Date: May 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781738267422
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Pen Jar Productions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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