A brash, engaging set of salvos that complicate our personal and political conditions.
A novelist and essayist delivers pithy and provocative takes on modern ethical and philosophical questions.
De Silva has a gentle manner with intellectual sacred cows: Do dying species really require our intervention? Might eating vegetables be just as morally questionable as eating meat? Do we defeat graffiti’s purpose if we treat it as art? Is the decline in the humanities in colleges such a bad thing? The author, who has a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge, takes on these and other questions via short essays. Stylistically, de Silva is part of a long tradition: Montaigne, Descartes, Barthes, and others have tried the quick-hit, more conversational style of philosophical writing as opposed to the fussier, more academic approach common to philosophy today. (The author has an essay about that, too.) But de Silva’s focus is mostly contemporary, looking at our current attitudes toward topics like terrorism, war, climate change, and technology. The brevity of the individual essays means the author has little space to do more than raise questions, which makes his comments sometimes read as glib, even trollish. For example, his assertion that a country unable to solve its own human rights issues lacks the standing to intervene in others’ comes off as fancied-up whataboutism. However, de Silva’s just-asking-questions approach is usually justified by the legitimacy of the questions. At his best, he reminds readers of their complicity in a host of moral quagmires. Thinking about war, for instance, as “a hazy, far-off thing is something positively desired by many of us, even if we don’t put it that way to ourselves.” Big tech firms, he writes, encourage “a stance of quiet resignation toward the world’s fate…and merely disciplining our emotional reactions rather than our destructive actions.” If brevity limits the development of certain ideas, the author’s approach also invites a wider audience.
A brash, engaging set of salvos that complicate our personal and political conditions.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944866-76-1
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Clash Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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