A sharply observant and richly sympathetic guide to conquering some persistent mental demons.
A therapist offers advice to readers with troubling behavioral problems in this self-help book.
Singer begins her wide-ranging overview of various mental problems—from anxiety to obsession and more pronounced issues like assorted forms of self-harm—with a simple encouragement to readers who may be experiencing such things or love somebody who is: You can do this. In her own practice helping patients, the author has employed a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help with the mental aspects of the problem and behavioral therapy calculated to change issue-causing environments. And in both cases, the initial aim is the same: to address the feeling of “stuckness” that exacerbates the anxiety from which so many of these thorny states arise. The goal, as the author winningly puts it, is to remove the need for her readers to see her or her professional colleagues at all. The main approach Singer takes to breaking down her material is inspired. She dramatizes patient experiences and encounters, using dialogue and other novelistic touches that succeed marvelously in making all of these problems seem at once more human and more treatable. These embellished case studies are then followed up with quick diagnostic discussions that feel more pointed because they’re dealing with fleshed-out individuals rather than clinical abstractions. One chapter shows readers a patient with an urge for ritualistic behaviors that accompanies obsessive-compulsive disorder, after which Singer addresses both the individual and the person’s partner. “As a partner of a loved one who suffers from ritualistic behavior, it is hard to view behaviors objectively,” she writes. “During treatment both individuals will learn new behaviors.” Whether the topic is agoraphobia, fetishism, or any number of different, unhealthy outgrowths of anxiety, the author provides an empathetic analysis without moral judgment, and always with an eye toward progress instead of stagnation. People experiencing some of these behavioral issues will find this book invaluable.
A sharply observant and richly sympathetic guide to conquering some persistent mental demons.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73-594481-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Laurie Singer Behavioral Services
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
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
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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