Trenchant observations from an influential journalist.
The veteran journalist collects his controversial views on sex, religion, politics, and plagues.
Sullivan, whose essays, reviews, articles, and blog posts have appeared in the New Republic (where he was an editor), the New York Times, New York magazine, and the Weekly Dish newsletter, gathers 60 pieces from the past three decades that serve as both a chronicle of his life and a record of significant transformations in American culture. Describing himself as having “a querulous, insistent curiosity that sometimes relishes the hostility it often provokes,” Sullivan is not surprised to have incited strong responses: “An essay insisting on the biological roots of masculinity enraged some feminists; my opposition to ‘hate crime’ legislation maddened my fellow gays; my account of the moment AIDS in America no longer qualified as a plague was denounced.” His attack on the use of torture by the Bush administration infuriated the right, just as his attack on critical race and gender theory incensed the left. As a gay man, Sullivan has lived through a sea change in attitudes about homosexuality and gender, from grudging allowances for domestic partnerships to the legalization of gay marriage. His own marriage, in 2007, seemed momentous. With mixed feelings, he observes the erosion of any “single gay identity, let alone a single look or style or culture.” He argues that “distinctive gayness” was “integral” to gay identity. “It helped define us not only to the world but also to ourselves,” he writes. “Letting go is as hard as it is liberating, as saddening as it is invigorating.” Testosterone therapy, which he began in 2000 as a result of being HIV-positive, made him viscerally aware of the surge of energy, aggression, lust, and anger that resulted from what he called the “He Hormone.” Other pieces reveal Sullivan’s thoughts on Christianity, the death of his beloved beagle, Princess Diana as a cultural icon, Obama as a beacon of hope, and, most recently, Covid-19.
Trenchant observations from an influential journalist.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5589-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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