A tender, relatable set of works on experiencing and overcoming heartbreak.
Paradiso presents a collection of poems about love, loss, and healing.
The book’s first section, “thunder,” uses a storm metaphor to describe a tumultuous relationship’s end, while the second, “daisy,” explores the speaker’s emotional growth following that painful experience. In the opening poem, “passing storm,” Paradiso describes a love that shakes the speaker awake, lights up her eyes, and opens her up to love; then the energy shifts, and lies and games tarnish the relationship. In the aftermath of the failed romance, the speaker in “running” wonders if starting over in a new city would provide relief, writing, “i’ll fill my head with different thoughts / there won’t be the promises you whispered / your touch / or other precious things that can’t be bought.” The pitfalls of technology in modern relationships are the foci of “virtual disconnect,” in which texts, photographs, and screens keep love interests at a distance. The speaker laments that her ex preferred to be alone with their fantasies rather than reciprocate affection; after much introspection and mourning, the speaker comes out the other side, able to make beauty from the ashes. Among the lessons learned are to “see people for who they are / not who you wish them to be” (“slow down”) and to not “let the people / who don’t deserve your energy / take it from you”(“note to self”). Confident that they will find love again, the speaker in “my kind of peace” disavows lukewarm love and mixed feelings, instead seeking “passionate peace.” Some readers may feel that the book’s themes feel limited in scope, and that the storm and daisy motifs lack originality. However, others will find that the poet effectively blends raw vulnerability with empowering recovery, acutely depicting the difficulties of dating in the digital age, when reminders of one’s ex are online and unavoidable. Some readers are likely to find solace in lines such as “look past your heartache / see yourself as i see you / you’re not your bad experiences / you’re not your mistakes” (“look closer”). Simple, tasteful line drawings of female figures enhance the poems’ intimacy.
A tender, relatable set of works on experiencing and overcoming heartbreak.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798991217002
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2025
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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