Are there Martians out there? Baron has evident good fun looking into the origins of an ongoing craze.
Entertaining account of the Mars madness that saturated popular culture at the turn of the 20th century.
Every year or two for a couple of centuries, a new book or movie or bit of news comes along to suggest that Mars once hosted life forms—and may yet do so, hidden under red rocks and sand dunes. As science journalist Baron records, that long trend traces back to the late 19th century, with numerous protagonists. In France, Camille Flammarion, a budding scientist, wrote novels in his spare time in which he supposed “other planets to be populated by the souls of dead humans,” with one pair of doomed lovers reincarnated on Mars. So popular was Flammarion that an admirer gave him an imposing château outside Paris that he converted into his own observatory. In the U.S., Baron continues, came “the Mars boom of 1892,” promulgated by, among others, future news magnate Joseph Pulitzer, whose papers breathlessly reported “three bright spots, like powerful searchlights,” beaming down from Martian mountains. Italian scientist Giovanni Schiaparelli speculated that the regular lines that he could see through his telescope were ancient canals, a theme picked up by American astronomy buff and patron Percival Lowell, who in turn was sure that ancient civilizations once flourished on Mars. On that note, Baron turns to the liveliest part of his story, namely the influence of all this tentative, often flawed science on popular culture. He writes, “Lowell’s influence leapfrogged to a whole new generation when the creator of another craze—the Tarzan novels—wrote a string of adventure books set on a fictional Mars known by its inhabitants as Barsoom.” That author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, in turn inspired Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and many other sci-fi writers who gave us shelves of books by which to “pass Lowell’s imaginative torch on to yet another generation.”
Are there Martians out there? Baron has evident good fun looking into the origins of an ongoing craze.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781324090663
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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