An imaginative but frequently frustrating guide.
A five-step program to “creating a life you love.”
In this self-help work, debut author Duncan takes the reader through a simple, step-by-step process to access their “Superconsciousness.” He begins with an account of a 2016 “wake-up call,” when his friend, mentor, and business partner was killed in a motorcycle accident. The immediate aftermath was catastrophic: The business fell apart, and Duncan was devastated. He says that he had “given up” when a woman named Colette introduced him to a new self-help method, which featured the idea of Superconsciousness as a means of healing and change. He stresses that this Superconsciousness is inherent in everybody—it just needs to be accessed and understood; he defines it as “an aspect of you, which is more ‘You’ than anything you think you are…where your innate genius, intuition, and universal connection is.” Duncan asks his readers a direct question: What would you really love to create? The answer to that question is your truth, he asserts, and is “why you are on the planet.” To help readers achieve that goal, Duncan lays out five key actions, including envisioning a desired result and creating new “emotional set points” that are aligned with the person you want to be, among other steps. His writing style as he lays out these concepts is direct and vigorous, with plenty of short paragraphs and bullet points. However, readers may be skeptical of some of the book’s claims. For instance, the author writes that “science supports everything I write in this book,” although he provides no citations of specific studies. He also describes Superconsciousness as a Force-like field connecting “all who are in a certain structure” and asserts, without evidence, that it’s the reason why birds fly in unison. His allusions to quantum physics offer only a vague understanding of its concepts, and many readers will take issue with his final assertion that “The best way to change the world is to get this book into as many hands as possible.”
An imaginative but frequently frustrating guide.Pub Date: April 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-54-451944-9
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Duncan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2022
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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