An entertaining, brilliantly shot look at a Texas high school tradition.
Schultz explores the culture of Texas homecoming mums in this debut book of photography and reportage.
Across the country, high school girls often wear chrysanthemum corsages to their yearly homecoming football games. In Texas, however—where everything is bigger—the homecoming mum has morphed into an elaborated affair featuring as many as twenty artificial mums personalized with ribbons, beads, feathers, trinkets, messages, and the like. Schultz, who attended high school in Florida, first encountered the phenomenon of Texas homecoming mums after moving to the Lone Star State as an adult. She was immediately fascinated: “Is a mum just a mum or is a mum a metaphor?” she wonders early in the book. “Is the thing greater than the sum of its parts, much like the person who wears it, or the state in which it thrives, or the society in which it stands?” With this book, Schultz sets out to explore—through stories and photographs—the culture of mums: how the tradition originated, how it has changed over the years, and what it means for the schools, students, parents, and communities who participate. It’s a tale rooted in a particularly Texan love of maximalism, but one that also tells a larger story of the human need for ritual and pageantry. Schultz’s spirited prose vividly captures the colors and textures of the mums and their wearers, as when the author gets to try one on and strut around: “When you’re enveloped in a mum of this size, there’s no direction to go but forward. As I found my footing to steer all three of my dimensions, the mum audibly cheered me on, because woven into it was a waterfall of sleigh bells and cowbells. With my every step, twist, and gesture, the bells involuntarily created a manic and discordant melody.” The many eye-catching black-and-white photographs are as instrumental as the text in communicating the soul of mum culture. Both seasoned Texas home-comers and readers completely unfamiliar with the tradition will be equally charmed by this beguiling quirk of Americana.
An entertaining, brilliantly shot look at a Texas high school tradition.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781639885657
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.
Four decades of football, as chronicled by a well-known sportswriter.
Longtime Sports Illustrated gridiron reporter King takes a maximalist approach, devoting one chapter to each year from 1984, when he started writing about the NFL, to 2023, the last season he covered the league full-time. This lengthy professional memoir features anecdotes and commentary, an argument-starting list of names for his “Mount Rushmore of Pro Football,” a crossword puzzle, and informative tidbits on tactics and playcalling, as well as profiles of singular players and warranted criticism of league bosses’ handling of player health and sports gambling. King skillfully charts the NFL’s inexorable growth. When he started, snail-mail newsletters were must-reads. In today’s media landscape, streaming networks have spent $4.3 billion to broadcast 58 games. As the author illustrates, Paul Tagliabue, a relatively unheralded league commissioner, engineered the year-round fan experience, with “tentpole events like a draft with more fanfare, free agency, and a new TV channel.” Polls showed that baseball and football were equally popular in the ’80s, but, by 2024, football had four times as many fans. Yet King’s kitchen-sink approach results in some bloat. Nobody yearns for a minute-by-minute rehash of the Cowboys’ 1991 draft or a rundown of the “quotes of 2002.” But amid the overabundance, there’s ample charm. In his best chapters, King catches up with guys he wrote about years ago. An 80-something Hall of Fame coach sketches Xs and Os on a notepad. A retired player known for his creative trash-talking shares tricks of the trade. In a powerful chapter, King visits a lab and looks at the damaged brain of a player he voted for in Hall of Fame balloting. This dovetails with King’s number-crunching on per-game hits sustained by players, important analysis as the league considers expanding its schedule.
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324123637
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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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