A poignant and visually stunning tribute to used bookstores.
Brown celebrates Seattle’s used bookstore scene in this nonfiction book.
“While the magic may reside in the books,” the author writes in the introduction to this work, the libraries, bookstores, and personal bookshelves that house them “offer both a refuge from exterior chaos and the thrill of possibility within their rows and nooks.” While libraries have historically discouraged socialization for quiet, individual study, and homogeneous big-box chain bookstores are designed to maximize profit, used bookstores offer bibliophiles a friendly respite. In addition to their randomized inventories, which include offbeat and out-of-print titles, they promote “a sense of comfort and accessibility that invites one to look, read, and stay for a while.” Labeled as a “love note to books, print, and a thank-you note to the booksellers,” this book is a celebration of the used bookstores that dotted Seattle’s landscape over the last two decades. The milieu is also an effective lens through which Brown explores broader changes in Seattle’s recent history: The Seattle of 1999 was an eclectic city defined by its underground music scene, bohemian sensibility, and a proliferation of bookstores. Following the internet and tech boom—driven in large part by Seattle’s own Amazon and Microsoft—the city shortly thereafter became a center of American capitalism, with a new aesthetic of homogeneous neighborhoods and traffic gridlock. The declining presence of used bookstores in today’s Seattle is emblematic, per the author, of these larger cultural changes. The origins of the book stem from a college project completed by Brown in an architectural photography class, and the book blends its astute analysis with photographs taken by the author of Seattle’s used bookstores (both interior and exterior shots) in addition to images of owners, book lovers, and store cats. Sadly, many of the city’s used bookstores open in 1999 have since closed; Brown makes an effective case that the “literacy, community, and human connection” that such institutions engender are an invaluable “way to hold on to some of the best parts of our cities and societies in the coming decades.”
A poignant and visually stunning tribute to used bookstores.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798886406627
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Ewings Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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