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 frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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