A cheerfully personal, if occasionally obscure, perspective on the complexities of Earth and beyond.
Marin offers a loosely autobiographical meditation on space, time, and other subjects.
The author explains that she does not particularly care for the Gregorian calendar; her main critique is that it has “very little to do with what the moon is up to.” In this work, Marin details a more moon-centered (or “luni-solar”) calendar. In this version, there are nine days in a week, mostly with names linked to planets (Vensday, for example). In the pages that follow, the author develops her calendar and presents a smorgasbord of other material concerning seasons, traditions, and the solar system. There are also personal reflections, such as notes on a trip the author took to Glastonbury in the early 2000s. Marin shares various dreams she’s had, including one that she has thought about for 30-some years, in which a being with red hair took her into another world. Both astronomy and astrology are given great attention: The author discusses how Saturn’s rings are divided into seven sections, and the reader learns about concepts like “Saturn Return,” which occurs when “Saturn occupies the same sign it did at a person’s birth.” This wide breadth of material sets the book apart from, well, most books—the reader is taken on a seasonally inspired journey that offers recipes, poems, and more. The free-wheeling nature of the text is buoyed by the author’s upbeat attitude, such as when the reader is encouraged at the beginning of one recipe to “Have fun!” Yet some points prove to be perplexing—Marin’s account of her trip to Glastonbury can be confusing. A number of topics, such as quotations from Robert Coon and mentions of a hostel called Black Sheep, are thrown at the reader in rapid succession; these passages may require re-reading to fully grasp what the author is conveying. Yet taken altogether, the many small pieces of the work add up to a unique and engaging whole.
A cheerfully personal, if occasionally obscure, perspective on the complexities of Earth and beyond.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798987775400
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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