Scattershot but often ingenious.
A mathematician looks at fiction and poetry and discovers a great deal that excites her.
Hart opens by pointing out that Moby-Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, and Tristram Shandy all contain references to cycloids, a “beautiful mathematical curve.” Furthermore, Tolstoy writes about calculus, James Joyce about geometry. “Mathematical references in literary works,” writes Hart, “go back at least as far as Aristophanes’ The Birds, first performed in 414 BCE.” The author makes an entertaining case for the importance of math in literature, but literature lovers may or may not share her fascination. Genuine insights appear throughout along with a great deal of information that would be classified as oddball. Readers will be amused if not enlightened to learn about Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition, in which the most common vowel, E, was absent. In the sequel, Perec used E but no other vowel. It’s unclear how many readers will share Hart’s wonder at books whose pages are scrambled or the chapters readable in any order. Much of her text is not concerned with mathematics but numerology, the popular if often mystical fascination with numbers and letters, but readers may perk up at her engrossing analysis of the significance of certain numbers in various cultures—e.g., “the nine realms of Norse mythology, the Five Pillars of Islam, and biblical references like seven deadly sins, the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the forty days and nights of Noah’s flood, [and] the seventh seal.” Hart detours into intriguing areas that require close attention, including fractals and cryptography. Halfway through, she returns to the classics, especially Melville, Tolstoy, Joyce, and Poe, with an entire chapter devoted to Swift and nearly as much to the only genuine mathematician among them, Lewis Carroll. Mathematics turns up here and there, but numerology continues to figure prominently, and Hart casts a critical eye on writers’ calculations and science, both of which are often incorrect.
Scattershot but often ingenious.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781250850881
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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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