A thoroughly enjoyable book that’ll leave you with a craving to get creative.
A woodworking ambassador shares the love of his craft.
Offerman’s talents extend beyond Hollywood to woodworking—a subject the actor explored in Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop (2016). In his latest book, he imparts his wisdom to younger readers. Yes, the book is for little woodchucks, as he endearingly calls them, but more grizzled neophytes will also benefit. Neither young nor old will be able to resist his folksy, dry wit. “Historically, everybody knows the easiest way to make a bench,” he writes. “First off, you need to locate your personal sittin’ parts, also known as the caboose, booty, or butt.…I usually find mine by determining the area halfway between my kneecaps and my armpits and then heading around back. If that doesn’t work, just put on some funky music and watch out for the part that first begins to shake.” More useful, perhaps, are the instructions for making a bench. As with all the projects—among them carved creatures, whistles, and box kites—this one comes with a handy list of materials and tools. A helpful photo shows all the tools laid out; a note reads, “power tools eventually die, but this hand drill has been in Lee’s family for 3 generations. Suck on that, capitalism.” “Lee” is Offerman’s co-author, Buchanan; they appear in photos alongside adorable kids hard at work, including one in which a mock-terrified Offerman is being transported on a forklift…operated by a tot. In an introduction that’s funny and earnest, Offerman rhapsodizes about the joys of making things with one’s hands. He observes, rightly, that “when we learn to make things for ourselves, we can then make things for other people, and that’s a great way to tell those folks that you love them.…Beyond the fondness that your new powers will engender, those tool skills will carry over into your everyday practice, and you’ll become a better thinker in every aspect of your life.”
A thoroughly enjoyable book that’ll leave you with a craving to get creative.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593475263
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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PERSPECTIVES
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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