A luminous collection with potent metaphors and gorgeously earthy writing.
In Lee’s heartfelt essays, the quiet joys and tragedies of life—marriage, divorce, injuries, births, deaths—prompt meditations on regrowth.
These numerous, brief pieces include episodes from the author’s family life in Washington state and Idaho, including an account of his traumatic divorce after his first wife abandoned him and their four sons, and his later, blissful remarriage; a portrait of his young sons happily flinging cowpies at one another; tales of broken bones from playing on a backyard trampoline, which enabled the injured to “find the mettle within”; a story of an old friend’s homecoming after a harrowing five-year stint in a Chinese prison on false charges; an elegy for the author’s much-loved uncle Tom, who died at 45 of a drug overdose; and a riveting recounting of his grandfather’s struggle behind German lines during the Battle of the Bulge: “he was spared again, miraculously, while six of his group had their legs taken out by grazing machine-gun fire as they raced over an open field.” Other pieces offer piquant sketches of random people, including an elderly woman trudging alongside a snowy highway who just wanted a ride to a gas station for cigarettes. In evocative, literary montages, the author probes the fraught meanings of everyday social scenes, such as parents helping freshmen stock up at a college town Walmart. Lee’s vibrant writing is infused with aspects of his ecumenical Mormon faith and a mystical yet grounded sense of the divine within the mundane. The title essay refers to Celtic legends about when the distance between Heaven and Earth narrows—a metaphor, Lee writes, for “those mid-night hours…responding to the unexpected bark of a child sick with croup, that narrowing of the upper airway making it hard for them to breathe, which is why I held them, against my chest, in the bathroom, on the edge of the tub, with the hot water running and all that steam, like the Holy Spirit, rising.” The result is an entertaining and often moving homage to daily existence.
A luminous collection with potent metaphors and gorgeously earthy writing.Pub Date: July 1, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Cedar Fort
Review Posted Online: today
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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