A soulful and vivid analysis that both offers palpable context and stirs human understanding.
A personal chronicle of a complicated national history.
Despite rich oil fields and a strong cultural character, Venezuela was long overlooked, truly coming to global consciousness only with Hugo Chávez’s rise to power through the 1990s. The Chavismo government’s ever-expanding power and controversial geopolitical influence gave way to the dictatorship of Chávez’s anointed successor, Nicolás Maduro, and notoriety has increased with the United States’ January 2026 attack and capture of Maduro. This new attention has frequently made caricatures of a checkered history of coups and crackdowns, criminal gangs, and economic instability. But while electricity blackouts, currency fluctuations, and electoral fraud—and the poverty and violence they have incubated—have become the stuff of headlines and video games, they also have deeply affected Venezuela’s actual citizens, who are emigrating at staggering rates. And all this has occurred before the deadly earthquakes that devastated the country on June 24, 2026. Osío Cabrices’ latest work centers what it means to be one of these Venezuelans rather than the various world leaders, both within and beyond the country, who have exerted such tremendous control over them. With a prolific career in journalism that began in tandem with Chavismo—and as a member of the last generation to remember a democratic Venezuela—the author serves both as a witness to the country’s rapid swings, from prosperity to economic breakdown, and as an astute interrogator of its potential future. Personal recollections and historical accounts rush breathlessly into the text, echoing the constant, confounding evolutions of inequality, insecurity, and ideological battles. For the most part, the author keeps his personal opinions, affiliations, and inner turmoil beyond these pages (the exception is his expressed doubt of the intentions and efficacy of the U.S. interventions in January 2026). But his prose—bewildered, frenzied, and thick with barbs—elucidates the inevitable doubt, and even hardening, of being Venezuelan in this era while also sparking a certain defensive determination.
A soulful and vivid analysis that both offers palpable context and stirs human understanding.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781523537938
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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