An enjoyable and well-organized but familiar compendium of feline facts.
This primer on cats targets feline fans who want to learn more about their furry friends.
Wallin is a cat lover, and she’s put together a book about her favorite feline subjects, complete with a number of images by various photographers of her own dear pet, Kitty, and others. The short work (under 135 pages) tackles the broadest of cat topics, with chapters on the history of felines; an anatomy of the animals, with wisdom on what a twitching tail means and how they use their whiskers and eyes; how cats and humans communicate with each other; the lore of felines, such as their nine lives and why they land on their feet; cats in literature (or “Kitty Lit,” one of several clever chapter names); how cats comfort humans; and famous felines. She ends the volume with a dog’s diary and a cat’s diary, which humorously point out the differences in these domesticated pets’ demeanors. An epilogue details the author’s history with animals, including her beloved Kitty, who’s a fixture throughout the book. The chapters are short and packed with intriguing information, even if the details don’t always advance the story of cats. Most of this material has been published somewhere before, and Wallin has simply compiled the tidbits and skillfully organized them for her readers. (She does a superb job of giving credit where credit is due.) From the introduction, it’s clear that the primer will not delve too deeply. “Cats are not perfect,” the first words read. “They can be a little demanding and to risk understatement, very self-centered.” That won’t be news to many feline lovers, and that’s a problem with the work—not much is fresh or particularly insightful. The first chapter is a brief history of cats and, though feline fans will certainly love to know where their frisky friends came from, it doesn’t rigorously cover the subject. The chapter on the feline body, “Cat-ology,” tells readers that the animals are extraordinary jumpers—a well-known fact. Still, the book doesn’t purport to break new ground in feline studies, and what’s here is sweetly and concisely presented. Cat lovers should lap it up.
An enjoyable and well-organized but familiar compendium of feline facts.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781738945283
Page Count: 143
Publisher: re:books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2024
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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