More fun than watching Li’l Sebastian chow down on a waffle from JJ’s Diner.
A behind-the-scenes look at the hopeful world of Pawnee, Indiana.
The NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation aired its last episode 11 years ago, but it has never disappeared from public consciousness: The internet is still filled with screenshots and GIFs from the show (many featuring the viewer-favorite character Ron Swanson, the lovably gruff character memorably played by Nick Offerman). Armstrong, who has written books about the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld, and Sex and the City, traces the show’s development and evolution in her latest, which places the series in historical context. Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, who worked together on the U.S. version of the sitcom The Office, Parks and Recreation was initially touted by NBC as something of a companion to that show, and many expected it to be an outright spinoff, which led to a first season that was a critical and ratings disappointment. Drawing on interviews with the series’ cast and crew, Armstrong explains how the show evolved, leaning into its setting in the fictional town of Pawnee, where main character Leslie Knope (played by Amy Poehler) does her best to make the town a better place. The show, Armstrong writes, “creates a world of its own—as all good sitcoms do—and in that world, local government officials like Leslie and her crew are truly beacons of hope. It makes small-town government into a font of optimism, of faith in institutions. Government isn’t perfect, it says, but it helps people, no matter who they are or whether they deserve it.” The book is also rich in fun facts, including how the series was influenced by Schur’s admiration for the novelist David Foster Wallace, and how Leslie’s famous love of waffles came to be. Armstrong is an engaging writer, and her enthusiasm for the series is enormously contagious.
More fun than watching Li’l Sebastian chow down on a waffle from JJ’s Diner.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780593854518
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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