A mind-bending challenge to common assumptions about reality hampered by disorienting prose.
A debut author challenges ingrained notions of time and space in this nonfiction work.
Asking someone what time and space are, Kudevics notes, “is the same as asking what water is for fish.” He advocates for nonlinear thinking regarding these ideas, positing that this approach has moral implications; whereas “linearity is based on differences,” nonlinear consciousness, per the author, has the potential to create a “spherical oneness, a source of love and basic humanity.” Challenging readers to reexamine their assumptions about these concepts, the author offers an analogy of an unfolded map of the world. The map is clearly labeled with geographic locations and is drawn to scale, so that users can measure distance. When the same paper map is balled up and the details are no longer visible to the user, its features still exist but are “locked inside the ball.” Drawing on a range of thought experiments that are often not resolved with clear-cut answers (“Do we have any other kind of consciousness?”), Kudevics blends metaphysical ruminations on the nature of reality with his own experiences with unexplained paranormal circumstances. While on a bicycle ride, for instance, the author once turned a corner along a well-known route only to find himself lost in a new place that was miles away from where he should have been. Other examples are drawn from his more than four decades spent as a deep-sea captain contemplating the minuteness of his existence as he navigated the ocean’s vast surface with an unfathomably expansive realm stretching beneath him. Kudevics’ prose style is, by his own admission “disjointed,” rife with grammatically defiant “incomplete” thoughts and run-on sentences. While this is a deliberate effort to challenge linearity and convention in the writing process itself, and reflects the author’s philosophical rejection of the status quo, it makes for a disorienting read that distracts from (rather than amplifies) the book’s case for nonlinear thinking.
A mind-bending challenge to common assumptions about reality hampered by disorienting prose.Pub Date: June 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798284211069
Page Count: 54
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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