Though gentler than its title suggests, an intelligent and entertaining read.
Unexpectedly charming personal essays about disillusionment, diabetes, and despair.
Like her first book, Slaughterhouse 90210, Kreizman’s essay collection is anchored in her love of popular culture and takes its title from a Great Moment in Television. “In the final season of Mad Men, after Peggy and Joan have spent years clawing their way to the middle of their fictional advertising agency,” they have a meeting with the new owners of the firm during which the continued reign of the grossest kind of misogyny is confirmed. Afterward, Peggy asks Joan if she wants to get lunch, and Joan replies, “I want to burn this place down.” To Kreizman, this is a symbol of all the times she herself has had to learn that “working hard and playing by the rules can be futile and demeaning if the game itself has always been rigged.” While she opines convincingly about various societal issues—climate change, health care, corporate capitalism—the personal remains at the heart of her work, and some of the best essays are about her experience with diabetes, shedding light on the wider experience of chronic illness. It’s the writing that makes it sing: “Puberty beat the shit out of me in unique and astounding ways. My hormones, surging like a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke when you open it immediately after you’ve dropped it on the floor, caused my blood sugar to rise and fall and rise even higher with seemingly no correspondence to the insulin I was taking or the food I was eating.” Another standout is titled “Copaganda and Me,” in which she wrestles with the fact that after their shared childhood watching police shows on television, she grew up alienated while “[m]y brothers grew up and became cops, both of them. Twin Jewish cops.” Along with righteous anger, there’s plenty of sweetness, with evocative passages about her New Jersey childhood and paeans to her very happy union with a nice man named Josh. “I’m perpetually astonished to find that marriage is one of the only institutions that has not disappointed me.”
Though gentler than its title suggests, an intelligent and entertaining read.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063305823
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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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