An entertaining memoir of a train wreck of a life, and of picking one’s way out of the rubble.
A veritable mess slowly resolves into something approaching normality in this spry confessional.
Imagine a red-inked, angry declaration “sloppy” on a piece of grade-school homework, and then stretch that into an early life of blundering around: “It’s described me too many times, and in too many contexts, for me to remember who-all said it and why,” writes King, whether charged with being a sloppy drunk or having been raised to sloppy standards with no expectations of success or happiness. “My family is drunks the way other families are Teamsters or actors,” she writes, but she took that propensity well beyond alcohol to whatever drugs happened to cross her path. A stint in college ended in King’s working in a strip club (whence her nom de plume), although, she allows, “in reality, I was less a stripper than a daringly dressed cocktail salesman.” King’s memoir recounts a succession of hard knocks, from an abusive first husband to a brush with suicide (“an unfortunate but plausible method of avoiding enemy capture”). King, who has a few surprises to reveal along the way (a love of playing banjo, for one), is nothing if not self-aware; she allows that drugs and drink were an ultimately successful way of evading the patches of boredom that she now accepts, and she has smart things to say about her evolving feminist consciousness, with a confessed resentment for the fact that “so much of my teenage life was done to me by men.” It’s not as if she’s wholly adjusted to ordinary social expectations (“I remain an implacable shoplifter, and I still throw temper tantrums that would better befit a six-year-old”), but it seems as if she’s on the path.
An entertaining memoir of a train wreck of a life, and of picking one’s way out of the rubble.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593688458
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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