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 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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