A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age.
How painting can save your life.
Celebrated book designer, nonfiction author (Cover, 2014, etc.), novelist (The Delivery, 2021, etc.), and now painter, Mendelsund recounts his struggle with depression in a journal that begins early in the Covid-19 pandemic and ends two years and some 100 new paintings later. At the outset of the pandemic and already suffering from serious depression, Mendelsund retreated with his family to a New Hampshire farmhouse where he began to paint for the first time in his life. The book’s opening lines cleanly telegraph the story to come: “Rain on the drive. The undersides of the leaves were bright. Coming up the road, the barn was the first thing I saw. Large, almost black; presiding over a farmhouse, shed, a murky pond, and a large, untended field that stretched off and off.” There is the looming darkness, along with the faintest glimmer of light. Painting, it turns out, will offer that light. Mendelsund’s short, staccato chapters and clipped sentences feel like the exhaustion of depression and space for what can’t be expressed in words, just as a barn studio makes space for art-making and recovery. Though reminiscent of Anne Truitt’s published journals (Yield, 2022, etc.), which grapple with art-making and life, and William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible (1990), Mendelsund’s book is singular in its quiet wit: “A sky so blue it came across as aggressively middlebrow. This depressed me further.” His humor, along with full-color reproductions of his startlingly good paintings, is solace from his sadness, both for the author and reader. He makes these paintings left-handed, sometimes under the influence. “My diligence in maintaining my incompetence has paid off. I have said my final fuck-you to expertise. Amazing.” And it is amazing. A kind of alchemical miracle: dilettante into artist, depression into creation, something slapdash into something wonderful.
A wry and fearless portrait of depression, and the strange solace of art-making in middle age.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781646222896
Page Count: -
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
