by Keith Houston ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2025
A pleasurable and well-researched journey into pop iconography.
A look at the complex, often serious world of emoji’s creators, gatekeepers, and enthusiasts.
This book by information-technology writer Houston (Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, 2023, etc.) comes at the end of a sort of Cambrian Explosion for emoji: For much of the 2010s, thousands of tiny icons emerged on programs and smartphones. Each “emoji season,” as he shows, prompts heated debates over which images were and weren’t included. But Houston also uses emoji to explore a deeper story about how technologies become ubiquitous (or don’t), how they change communication, and what emoji says about our cultural blind spots. The beginnings of emoji are surprisingly difficult to pin down—various proprietary software dating to the ’70s had some version of the images—but by the 2000s a sizable vocabulary and a certain design consistency emerged from its native Japan and beyond. The Unicode Consortium, which decides which emoji are made available, has had to make countless decisions, most recently around matters of inclusion and bias—its default yellow (read: white) faces now include multiple skin tones, and it addressed biases in depictions of professions as exclusively male (construction worker) or female (dancer). Houston can get deep in the weeds about the Unicode Consortium’s internal squabbles, which leaves less room for some other fascinating byways, like how emoji has impacted grammar and communication and why “stickers” and proprietary “celebrity ’moji,” designed to avoid Unicode’s strictures and turn a profit for their creators, have often fallen flat. Houston knows that any language whose mascot is a smiling poop pile can be treated only so seriously, so the text is charmingly filled with emoji as illustrations and within sentences, making it both a product of a new way of communicating as well as a study of it.
A pleasurable and well-researched journey into pop iconography.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781324075141
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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by David McCullough ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
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
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