Pink Floyd fans will love this tribute, as should anyone with an interest in rock history.
A history of the rock pioneers in the words of its members and those who knew them well.
Author Blake told the story of Pink Floyd in his 2008 book Comfortably Numb, and he returns to the psychedelic well in this oral history of the legendary psychedelic-rock band, which incorporates interviews he has done over the past 35 years with the band’s members and associates. He begins the book, appropriately, with a chapter on Syd Barrett, who left the band after their first two albums, haunted by severe mental illness; Blake speaks to Barrett’s beloved sister, Rosemary Breen, who remembers her late brother as “a child who never grew up.” The band persisted with its other members—Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason—and released a series of moderately well-received albums before becoming global superstars with their seminal 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, which Waters describes as “all Star Wars. The light side and dark side.’ Pink Floyd would release another legendary album, The Wall, which formed the basis for the cult-favorite 1982 film directed by Alan Parker (fun fact: Roald Dahl was initially approached to write the screenplay), but after Waters quit the band in 1985, the group never approached its previous heights. Blake mostly lets the band members and associated figures speak for themselves, which is a good decision: The irascible Waters and more careful Gilmour in particular prove eloquent. They also provide fascinating insight into the band’s early days, including a very funny story about an inflatable pig that slipped the surly bonds of Earth before alighting in a field of frightened cows. Floating like an angel above the book is Barrett, whose legacy Blake honors beautifully.
Pink Floyd fans will love this tribute, as should anyone with an interest in rock history.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798897101115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
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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