A deep and delightful exploration of the magnificent animal that has helped make our civilization possible.
Better understanding a “titanic beast.”
The horse has been humanity’s ally in transportation, farming, war, and peace for more than 4,000 years. The intimate relationship is unusual, as the horse evolved to have a very different experience of life to our own. Horses can hit speeds of 55 miles per hour. They can detect scents as well as a dog. They can recognize a person after more than two decades. And weighing well more than a half-ton, an adult horse’s sheer size makes them perilous partners. The human-horse collaboration is so extraordinary because we come from predator ancestors while horses descend from prey. Their instinct is to avoid and fear us—and virtually everything else. Jones, a neuroscientist and longtime horse trainer, quotes an old adage: “Horses are scared by 1) things that move, and 2) things that don’t move.” Yet, about 2200 B.C.E., human began learning how to figuratively and then literally harness these megafauna. Now, with an ever-expanding knowledge of the horse brain and the animal’s behavior, Jones explains how our seemingly antagonistic minds can both be trained to work in unison. “With years of daily training,” Jones writes, “horse-and-human teams can form what has been hailed as the ‘neurobiological miracle’ of direct brain-to-brain communication. We are the only cross-species pair known to share neural activation between brains in real time.” That’s according to EEG studies, with the horses doing most of the brain-wave moderation. The human rider benefits from the horse’s 340-degree horizontal visual field. The horse gains the human’s far-better depth perception. This simple example illustrates Jones’ point that “this conjoined mind operates well not because the two brains are similar to each other, but because they are so different.…It is a partnership like no other.”
A deep and delightful exploration of the magnificent animal that has helped make our civilization possible.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9780316582582
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
