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IN THE LAND OF GOOD LIVING

Name: IN THE LAND OF GOOD LIVING
Author: Kent Russell
ISBN: 978-0-525-52138-9

A JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF FLORIDA

by Kent Russell ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2020

Fans of Harry Crews and Carl Hiaasen will enjoy Russell’s entertaining, if lightweight, yarn.

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A picaresque, amiable ramble through arguably the weirdest state in the country. “You gotta understand,” writes essayist Russell. “Florida exists in the future continuous sense. Florida will be a personal paradise, yours to own as soon as we fill in this hellish bog.” It’s a conditional place, too, its survival contingent on the mercy of the rising sea. The author teamed up with a tough-willed Marine veteran and another buddy to wander through the entire Sunshine State, inspired by the politician Lawton Chiles, who, as an unknown candidate, walked most of the peninsula in order to introduce himself to voters. Their adventures lean toward both the madcap and the mundane. On the former front, for instance, Russell chronicles how they were intercepted by a heavily armed, apparently heavily drugged woman whose suspicion was aroused by their shopping cart, laden with cameras for a documentary they were making about “the peninsula that stupefies, sickens, infuriates, and finally embarrasses the rest of the nation.” Satisfied that their intentions weren’t nefarious, she gamely noted, “You can lick me up and down if you want. I’ve been in the ocean.” Russell politely declined. They also wandered into nests of Trump supporters to find that he’s admired because he “eats KFC on his plane,” just like a regular Joe. The political analysis seldom goes deeper, and the narrative is often superficial, a kind of gee-whiz take on a place that, as journalist and Florida native Craig Pittman has written, exceeds every other place in strangeness. And why should that be? Russell doesn’t deep-dive, borrowing instead from T.D. Allman, another journalist, to note that people who come to Florida have tended to want to re-create the societies and places they’ve left behind, if with a slightly hallucinatory quality—which seems just right. Fans of Harry Crews and Carl Hiaasen will enjoy Russell’s entertaining, if lightweight, yarn.

Pub Date: July 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-525-52138-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: April 25, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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FILLED WITH FIRE AND LIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

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THE TALE OF A NIGGUN
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

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NIGHT
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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IndieBound Bestseller

A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A CARTOON COLLECTION

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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Awards & Accolades

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Our Verdict

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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.