A winning, captivating, engrossing collection.
A master essayist ranges far and wide with aplomb.
In his latest book, New York Times Magazine writer at large Mooallem gathers a diverse dozen of his thoughtful, probing essays. He suggests that the thread holding them together is one line: “Why are we not better than we are?” In an emotional, inspirational essay about B.J. Miller, a triple-amputee palliative-care physician, the author describes how Miller has dedicated his life to a profound question: “What is a good death?” In a harrowing, suspenseful personal piece about a kayak trip with two friends in Alaska when Mooallem was in his 20s, the author recounts one friend being hit by a falling tree, suffering serious injuries, and the unlikely, lifesaving Coast Guard rescue. “This is My Serious Face” is a witty essay about Mooallem’s doppelgänger, a famous, graceful bullfighter who looked just like him, complete with the “conspicuously crooked” face that has people “scrutinizing its angles, considering it as an object.” After a heart-rending piece on human threats to Hawaii’s endangered monk seals, Mooallem offers up a brief yet profound look at a looming crisis inherent in the “prisoner reentry program” in the U.S., which “tends to focus on solving structural problems, like providing housing, job training, or drug treatment, but easily loses sight of the profound disorientation of the individual people being released.” The author’s narrative prowess is on full display in a powerful, tragic essay on the wildfire devastation in Paradise, California, leaving “a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live.” An insightful profile of acclaimed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman—“known for films so rich with surreality and self-referential lunacy that they feel as if they might be spun apart by the force of their strangeness, yet miraculously cohere”—playfully collapses in on itself, and Mooallem closes with a reflective inquiry on Neanderthals, Gibraltar Man, and how we use flawed information to reach feelings of “superiority over other people.”
A winning, captivating, engrossing collection.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-50994-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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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