A delightfully haphazard anthology of humorous looks at food, work, and life in modern America.
Debut author Haley offers amusing observations about life in the 21st century in this nonfiction book.
“Will this book change your life?...Will it help you find solutions to the problems that plague you?” asks the author in the opening lines of this book. The answer, per Haley’s characteristically charming, self-deprecating humor, is a resounding, “No.” It will, however, evoke frequent laughter over the course of nearly 40 eclectic short chapters, united only by their genre-defying randomness. One chapter focuses on modern food; the author notes that, while the diet of health-conscious eaters “consists mainly of food yanked from trees and chicken,” those with less discerning palates now have access to abominations like “hot dogs with cheese in the middle” and other concoctions formulated by society’s best “food engineers.” Other chapters offer Covid-19-era exercise tips for the next pandemic (which include “getting the mail”); explain how to “Explode Your Retirement Savings by Maybe Winning Big in Las Vegas”; and outline how to become a “Real Stand-Up Employee” by purchasing a standing desk. One particularly hilarious chapter looks at the official adoption of “golf ball-sized hailstone” as an official unit of measurement used by meteorologists; Haley reports that NASA has followed suit, declaring “yay high” as its new official measurement of distance. With only a handful of exceptions, the book generally avoids scatological or partisan political humor, offering instead a gut-busting collection of family-friendly, non-offensive comedy. Its chapters are supplemented by an ample assortment of photographs with amusing captions and an appendix with instructions for nonplussed readers on how to turn the book’s pages into paper airplanes. Rarely meanspirited, Haley saves his most piercing barbs for himself, noting, for instance, that he “knew he wanted to be a writer the moment he put on his first cardigan sweater about one year ago.” At just over 100 pages, this is an easy read that is best consumed a chapter or two at a time.
A delightfully haphazard anthology of humorous looks at food, work, and life in modern America. (appendix; about the author)Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781312543744
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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