A weird, discordant jumble of one man’s thoughts, photos, and online arguments.
Blair presents ruminations on a wide variety of topics.
In his latest “hypervolume,” the author creates collages of images (blank screens, blurry snapshots, photos of concrete) and combines them with various kinds of text, ranging from bullet-pointed historical facts to personal observations to copies of correspondence. A scattered few passages from the book are intriguing for the world-view they represent, but even these are undermined by other inclusions, such as the “open letter” the author sent to the FBI in 2024 acknowledging some of the mistakes present in the multiple copies of his earlier book that he had sent to FBI headquarters (readers may reasonably question the wisdom of sending unsolicited copies of one’s book to FBI headquarters). Blair haphazardly dispenses historical information; he tells his readers that on January 8, 1790, George Washington gave the first State of the Union, which is true, but he also makes the statement that in January of 2021, “many Americans became super-worried about the U.S.,” which is so generic it’s practically meaningless. As with the author’s earlier hypervolumes, it’s virtually impossible to imagine an engaged readership for this work beyond Blair himself. The pages are filled with mysterious ephemera that can only have significance to the author: random photos of highways, buildings, and clouds; pictures of the covers of his earlier books; an old photo of his aunt and uncle; long transcripts of arguments he’s had on Facebook Messenger; and so on, endlessly. Readers will quickly get the impression that they are seeing the private, disjointed jottings of an author who’s deeply incorrect about how interesting his random thoughts are to other people. There are occasional compelling notes in the work, but the vast bulk of it is noise.
A weird, discordant jumble of one man’s thoughts, photos, and online arguments.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781963470130
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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