A suggestive overview of the making of an infamous murderer’s warped character.
How a pathological maternal influence shaped a famous killer.
On the brink of the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Stillman, author of Blood Brothers, Mustang, and other books, explores Lee Harvey Oswald’s relationship with his mother as a means of understanding the killer’s deepest motivations. This work joins an enormous body of scholarship that investigates the perpetrator and his relationships with key figures. While avoiding the wildest conspiracy theories, the author posits that Oswald was, in effect, aided in his crime by his mother, Marguerite, who passed on to him an obsessive interest in achieving personal notoriety. Drawing on some of the most prominent treatments of the subject as well as original archival research, Stillman focuses on Oswald’s chaotic childhood and Marguerite’s alternation between neglect and indulgence. In particular, the author examines his disruptive transitions between schools as the family changed residences, as well as an ominous potential for violence that grew steadily through his adolescence. Stillman offers a plausible explanation for the development of a dangerous loner bent on making his mark in the world. Like other commentators, the author sees both Marguerite and Oswald as emblematic of the dark side of national ideals. In her, we find “the promise and failure of the American dream.” Regarding Oswald, “while he certainly linked himself with various causes, and he may have convinced himself that one or the other of these was an identity for him at one time or another, the only cause he really had was himself—a distinctly American condition that in his case, and in the case of many who have followed the killing path, could have revealed itself in only one way.” Stillman synthesizes the conclusions of other scholars, but she offers little fresh insight. Moreover, a somewhat turgid style, marked by frequent and distracting allusions to cinematic and literary parallels, weakens the overall narrative.
A suggestive overview of the making of an infamous murderer’s warped character.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890681
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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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