A slow burn of a self-help book offering familiar advice.
Smith offers a self-help book for survivors of trauma.
The author aims to help readers heal and transform despite difficult pasts. An actress best known for her starring role on As the World Turns, Smith draws on her experiences of overcoming childhood illness, the devastating death of her mother due to a rare form of cancer, the sudden death of her sister, a divorce, and the loss of her dream home in this narrative of trauma and recovery. The series of losses motivated her to answer the question, “Who would I be, could I be, if nothing or no one had ever gotten in my way?” Unfinished business, or UFB, Smith asserts, can prevent people from becoming who they were meant to be. Unattended, she cautions, it can result in an “emotional hairball.” Once the UFB is identified, readers are instructed to work on releasing the past. Next, the author directs readers to identify and relinquish falsehoods that have guided their journeys thus far so they can embark on new ones. Throughout the narrative, the author incorporates anecdotes and success stories from her coaching clients. There is useful guidance here for people recovering from loss. However, when Smith makes assertions such as “Hardship is not a handicap; it is an opportunity for growth. It is a doorway to deep wisdom,” it sets the bar rather high for survivors who may not be as optimistic about the utility of their traumatic experiences. The lead-up to taking action is unnecessarily long; the program does not begin until Chapter 6, a full 55 pages in. The author also includes superfluous sections on the definitions of the soul, the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind, concepts with which most self-help readers will already be familiar. Finally, the constant interruptions by inspirational quotes inserted into the middle of the text are distracting.
A slow burn of a self-help book offering familiar advice.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425159
Page Count: 288
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 9, 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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