An illuminating addition to the literature of abolitionism, the Civil War, and the struggle for civil rights.
A stirring reconstruction of a little-known act of Black resistance to slavery.
Poet Aptowicz turns to the history of her native Pennsylvania with the story of William Parker, enslaved in neighboring Maryland. After having been forced to fight other enslaved men in bare-knuckle contests, a teenage William came to blows with his own enslaver. He fled, making his way to a little Quaker community across the state line, where “whenever strange white men showed up waving ‘runaway slave’ notices, the town’s Black residents had a remarkable talent for vanishing—and not a soul in Christiana would tell you a thing about it.” Years passed after Parker’s arrival in 1839, but a vigilante posse tracked him down. “When kidnappers beaten by Parker and his men arrived bloodied and broken-limbed at a local tavern,” writes Aptowicz, “white doctors…refused them treatment once they learned why the men were injured.” A natural leader, Parker had formed a self-defense organization. Well-armed, they were prepared when his former enslaver arrived in September 1851 with a gang of “paddy rollers,” accompanied by a federal marshal. In the ensuing gunfight, known as the “Christiana Riot,” the enslaver was killed, touching off a long inquest that ended with true justice being served. William, meanwhile, escaped a second time, making his way to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Aptowicz places these events against a backdrop that includes a portrait of Philadelphia as a center of the abolitionist movement and, more, of a thriving Black community of free, often prosperous citizens. She also places William’s story against the fraught tensions between free and slaveholding states, with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 giving kidnappers and bounty hunters free rein to travel throughout the country in search of runaways. It makes for a swift-flowing narrative, with appearances by Frederick Douglass and John Wilkes Booth, thoroughly documented but accessibly written.
An illuminating addition to the literature of abolitionism, the Civil War, and the struggle for civil rights.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781668035931
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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