This exuberant collection won’t have you curbing your enthusiasm about a great show.
Pretty, pretty, pretty hard to resist.
Life Be Not Proud. Going Backwards. Something So Wrong. These are some of the titles that were suggested for the TV series that Larry David was developing in the late 1990s. When the names were put up for a vote among friends, no one chose the title David suggested. No matter. It was his show, and he went ahead with his name: Curb Your Enthusiasm. Good thing, that. It’s difficult to imagine a sitcom named Something So Wrong lasting 12 seasons—120 episodes in all—over 24 years. This is one of the many nuggets that readers will glean from this authorized coffee-table celebration of what has to be one of the funniest-ever TV shows—unless you have a problem with cringe comedy that focuses on the everyday neuroses of a self-centered, pampered, and misanthropic actor named Larry David. In the show’s early days—it premiered in 1999—HBO had no way of knowing that David, even post-Seinfeld, had a hit on his hands. In this as-told-to companion book, written by Los Angeles Times news and culture critic Ali, Susie Essman recalls David offering her a role over the phone without an audition. Essman: “I said, ‘Send me a script.’ He said, ‘There’s no script, and there’s no money. It’s low-budget. You’re going to have to fly yourself out and put yourself up.’” One can only imagine how Essman’s character—the gloriously in-your-face and profane Susie Greene, wife of David’s agent, Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin)—would have replied to such a paltry offer. The book gets into David’s Brooklyn roots—his parents hoped he’d be a mailman (“That was their best-case scenario”)—and it explores the show’s famously improvised scenes. “It felt fresh,” Ali writes. “No canned jokes. No scripted pauses for laughs.” In addition to the many interviews—not all of them especially insightful—the book includes a bounty of images, a map of locations, and a useful episode guide.
This exuberant collection won’t have you curbing your enthusiasm about a great show.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798894141589
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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