A compelling case that Churchill passed the baton across the ocean.
An overseas role model.
John F. Kennedy remains an attractive figure, as Nelson shows in his fine biography. He was the second (and initially neglected) son of a wealthy and pugnacious businessman who initially supported Franklin D. Roosevelt. Appointed ambassador to Britain in 1938, Joseph Kennedy was recalled in disgrace after two years of insisting that the U.S. should stay out of a war that Britain would certainly lose. Largely ignored, John was a mediocre student at Harvard but finished with a bang as he grew fascinated with international affairs and wrote a senior thesis on British appeasement, published as Why England Slept, that became a bestseller. After his older brother Joseph’s death in 1944, JFK became the focus of his father’s ambition, so family money and influence played a major role in his election to the House in 1946, the Senate in 1952, and the presidency in 1960. Fascinated by Winston Churchill, JFK read and reread everything written by the British statesman; Nelson argues this vastly improved his oratory, persuaded him to reject his father’s isolationism, and exerted a powerful influence on his policies as president. Churchill earned immortality by warning against dealing with a tyrant from a position of weakness and then, as prime minister, fending off Hitler until his opponents got their act together. By the late 1940s, the tyrant was Stalin, and Kennedy, never much interested in domestic affairs, focused on anticommunism. Like his hero, he emphasized negotiation and summits but also worked to strengthen the military. Churchill was “the greatest man he ever met,” Kennedy once said; Churchill also admired the American president. The former prime minister’s granddaughter recalled watching TV with him one night in 1963: “Tears poured down Grandpapa’s cheeks as news came in that the young President had died….He left the table and spent a long time sitting before the fire, staring into it.”
A compelling case that Churchill passed the baton across the ocean.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781541705432
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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