Easy recipes delivered with homey appeal.
An accessible approach to basic cooking skills for beginners in the kitchen from Finnegan.
The book begins with a brief overview of the history of cooking. From there, the author takes the reader through some staple kitchen ingredients and simple instructions for how they may be generally prepared. She starts with potatoes and continues with more essentials, including proteins, soups, and sauces. The recipes don’t include many specific measurements aside from the sections on baking, which emphasize the ingredients’ ratios to each other. Each section is accompanied by a short history of the primary ingredient being explored. The final chapters break this format—Chapter 9 provides a list of examples of possible accidents that may happen in the kitchen, and Chapter 10 is a collection of thoughts and “rants” related to cooking and modern trends (it also cites some helpful tips from the author’s own mother). The recipes themselves are exactly what the book says they will be: the very basics. Overall, the book has a lighthearted tone, which includes seemingly throwaway comments in the recipes like, “My husband’s favourite, and he was great at cooking it.” The layout of the pages is poor, however, with many of the images being oddly sized, awkwardly placed, and ineptly cropped. The text appears in multiple fonts, colors, varying degrees of boldness, and contains typos. While there’s an appendix dedicated to books that Finnegan recommends, citations would have been helpful for readers who want to learn more about some of the author’s historical material. Additionally, more detail in the recipes would have been appreciated. Sépi, the cookbook’s illustrator, works in a style reminiscent of cartoonist Gary Larson; the illustrations do little to enhance the text, but they don’t detract from the contents. Despite the technical imperfections, the cookbook maintains a cozy charm and casualness that may evoke readers’ memories of cooking with their own parents or grandparents.
Easy recipes delivered with homey appeal.Pub Date: May 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781739432829
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Callender Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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