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 football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
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