An uplifting, if fulsome, collection of tales.
A columnist provides dozens of true stories in this volume.
As a standout athlete from Southern Alabama, Black achieved his “dream” when his beloved University of Alabama offered him a baseball scholarship. But after a debilitating injury relegated him to the practice squad, he quit the team in a decision he still regrets 40 years later. Now a weekly columnist for the Monroe Journal, the author has dedicated his life to supplying readers with inspirational tales that he hopes encourages “others to pursue their dreams, and to never give up on them.” In this collection of over 50 stories that average under four pages, Black delivers a relentlessly optimistic montage of individuals who overcame hardships to achieve their goals. With a penchant for simplistic yet moving Horatio Alger–esque tales, the stories range from Harry de Leyer, who turned an “old farm horse” into the 1958 “Horse of the Year,” to George Washington Carver, who revolutionized modern science despite being born an enslaved person and living during an era of intense racial injustice. Given the author’s athletic background, it’s no surprise that many of the tales revolve around sports, with intriguing anecdotes about professional baseball stars and vibrant retellings of famed moments in history, such as Jesse Owens’ Nazi-defying victories at the 1936 Olympics and 1980’s “Miracle on Ice,” when a young United States hockey team defeated the veteran Soviet Union players. Though heavy on Americana, from baseball to Walt Disney, there are a few international figures, such as Renoir and Nelson Mandela, who appear in vignettes. While every story shares an overcoming-all-odds, underdog motif, the book could have used more organization, as the tales are presented in a rather scattershot manner that lacks chronological or thematic order. Although the volume admirably includes both White and Black figures, few Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or other minorities are highlighted except as tangential characters. Women, while profiled in a few chapters, are similarly underrepresented. Cynical readers may scoff at the work’s hagiographic approach to storytelling, but others will find the stirring prose a welcome respite from harsh realities where dreams are too often deferred.
An uplifting, if fulsome, collection of tales.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bluewater Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
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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