A spicy blend of humor, irony, wit, facts, fable, and heart.
The creator of the Mobituaries podcast fleshes out that material and also includes a wealth of supplementary essays and other new information.
Writing with Greenberg (English/Montclair State Univ.; The Cambridge Introduction to Satire, 2019, etc.), CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Rocca (All the Presidents’ Pets, 2004) displays his eclectic interests, ranging from Lord Byron, who makes two separate appearances, to the New Jersey Turnpike service areas. Most major sections feature a “mobituary,” which is a lament, sometimes serious, sometimes ironic, sometimes amusing, for someone or something no longer with us. Among these are Thomas Paine, the original Siamese twins, medieval medical practices, Prussia (“always coming up in the context of wanton militarism, which made me think…I’m pretty sure it must be German”), the idea of homosexuality as a mental illness, Billy Carter, Farrah Fawcett, and myriads more. Following most of the mobituaries is a section dealing with cases similar to the one(s) he has just discussed. His section on people confused for each other shows his playful sense of humor—e.g., he includes Joan of Arc and actress Joan Van Ark. As his lengthy Works Consulted testifies, Rocca has done his homework: His sources include not only biographies and histories, but also interviews (where possible) with the people involved. Occasionally, a small error intrudes—Mary Godwin was not yet Mary Shelley when she began work on Frankenstein—but the research is generally sound throughout. Though much of the tributes are funny and wry, others are quite moving (Sammy Davis Jr., a “supernova talent”). Rocca also reminds us of some long-forgotten figures—comedian Vaughn Meader, for example, who rocketed to fame with his John F. Kennedy impersonations and then plummeted after JFK’s death. Political attitudes are sometimes patent, sometimes not.
A spicy blend of humor, irony, wit, facts, fable, and heart.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-50-119762-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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