A graceful literary memoir.
Reflections on a life of reading.
A writer, English professor, and single parent to two young sons, Anderson offers a gentle meditation on loneliness and connection, with books central to her thinking. Her aim, she reveals, is “to weave together my own often contradictory thoughts on labor, literature, and companionship and to explore how books had taught me about solitude and also brought me closer to the people I most love.” She intends, as well, to reconcile the contradictions inherent in being a writer and a mother, both involving “so much work and passion.” Confessing that she’s “someone who believes that the answers to life’s mysteries are to be found in books,” Anderson reflects on what she has learned from a wide array of authors, some of whom wrote for children—Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, James M. Barrie, and her beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder—and many others for adults, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Zadie Smith, John Milton to Toni Morrison. Anderson juxtaposes her own experiences—as a graduate student, competitive runner, mother, teacher—with the books that afforded her insights. “Novels,” she notes, “have long been celebrated as a literary form that offers readers unique access to that illusory and intoxicating kind of ‘knowing’ not otherwise possible in real life.” That access, though, is not particular to novels: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for example, makes Anderson uncomfortably aware of the sameness of her days, focused as they are on child care. She feels she is “not living so much as waiting,” and she yearns to move forward. Shakespeare’s ghosts also incite a feeling of recognition. Ghosts and shadows intrigue her, she admits, “because I feel like them in this regard: not sure if I am really there.” In books, she has traveled paths to self-discovery.
A graceful literary memoir.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780231218504
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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