An enjoyable romp through the back alleys of scientific research, proving that knowledge and fun can easily go together.
A quirky compilation presents an engaging stroll through a forest of peculiar subjects.
For anyone who often finds life difficult, depressing, and too serious, this book is for you. Balakrishnan and Wasowski collect dozens of presentations from their Nerd Nite events, which are held monthly. There is also a YouTube channel, curated by the authors, who between them have a good mix of expertise. The subjects are largely scientific and cover topics ranging from the chemical basis of hangovers to the complex math of gossip. Some of the presenters are established scientists, while others are doctoral students or people who just know a lot about a specific topic. Several of the essays are laugh-out-loud funny—e.g., Jane Gregory’s piece about why some people are driven to paroxysms by small but repetitive sounds, such as those made by the annoying individuals who eat chips straight from the foil bag (“misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing).” Others, such as the zombie creatures of the animal kingdom or dealing with excrement in space, are cleverly droll. Many, such as the piece titled “Why Nuclear Fusion Would Be Awesome—If We Get It to Work” or the one explaining how to manipulate perceptions of physical attractiveness (“Hot or Not? How To Be a Perfect 10”), are surprisingly informative. Most of the essays are only a few pages, so the book is a good one to dip into when a lift in mood is required, and Orr’s wacky illustrations provide a further dimension. One regrettable omission is that there is no contribution on influencing fungi, although it is clear that Balakrishnan and Wasowski are fun guys.
An enjoyable romp through the back alleys of scientific research, proving that knowledge and fun can easily go together.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781250288349
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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