An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.
Looking for a dollop of LGBTQ+ lore with your brainteasers? This beguiling puzzle book has you covered.
Puzzle-maker Shatzer presents hundreds of word puzzles, logic puzzles, mazes, and trivia quizzes, all of them featuring queer themes. The roster includes word searches on a variety of queer-friendly subjects from The Wizard of Oz (look for “Poppy/Field” and “Judy/Garland”) to Joe Biden’s lesbian press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre; “Queerdoku[s],” which are like Sudokus but with letters; decoding puzzles constructed around witticisms from the likes of RuPaul; and word jumbles that yield lubricious puns, like, “When cruising at the mostly-straight gym, make sure you don’t get this” (“spotted”). For those who prefer visual-spatial tests, there are intricate mazes, including an elegant one with branching walls shaped like the Greek letter lambda, and a spot-the-difference puzzle featuring 16 minutely altered versions of the National Coming Out Day cartoon logo. Brainiacs will find knotty logic puzzles that ask them, for example, to deduce the rankings of contestants in a Miss Red drag queen pageant from a set of gonzo clues (“Candi Apple was not asked about climate change”). Shatzer offers an extraordinary variety of puzzle types at many skill levels, from simplistic crosswords to difficult, abstract take-offs on classics, including “invisible mazes” that don’t even show where the maze walls are. (There’s a complete answer section at the back for those who get stuck.) The author explains the puzzles in brief how-tos that combine lucid instructions with feisty queer attitude. (“Those homophobic bigots on the right may say “Don’t Say Gay”, but here we say Gay all the time as loud as possible and as many times as possible!”) Solving the puzzles also provides a blithe immersion in queer trivia and humor. (One “namedropping” puzzle unveils an Ellen DeGeneres one-liner: “Twice I have shown up at a party wearing the same thing as someone else. Both times it was William Shatner.”) Hardcore puzzle afficionados and casual gamers alike will find plenty of amusement here.
An inventive and entertaining collection of japes.Pub Date: April 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798350992786
Page Count: 156
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
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
SEEN & HEARD
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