A thoughtful memoir of recovery and empowerment.
A recovering addict with nearly 30 years of sobriety shares his story of childhood trauma and the philosophy behind “the Phoenix movement.”
One night in 1997, Strode found himself at the end of an “uncontrolled nosedive,” crash-landing on his bathroom floor in the dark, snorting cocaine off a CD case, paranoid that the police were coming for him. He was sure that he was eventually going to die of a cocaine overdose if he didn’t stop using. “Instead of dying,” the author writes, “that’s the day Scott Andrew Strode was born.” Strode writes that he was dealing with unaddressed childhood trauma from living with an unstable father who routinely terrorized his children and threatened suicide if Strode’s mother ever left him. The author describes a typical interaction with his father this way: “I flinched and, looking down, girded myself as always for a possible strike. But his words always hurt far worse. ‘You’re more trouble than you’re worth!’ Sadly, I was beginning to believe him.” His journey to recovery, while discovering a love of mountain climbing and other sports, travels some ground that will be familiar to readers of recovery memoirs. However, it’s a lean, propulsive narrative that also serves as the necessary backdrop for understanding The Phoenix—the nonprofit organization that Strode started in 2007 to help others overcome trauma and addiction in a sober, active community. About the addiction crisis, he writes, “when addiction and overdose deaths reach an all-time high, it may be time to ask: What is it about today’s toxic culture that is causing so many deaths of despair?” The author asserts that those who suffer the most from addiction issues are just “canaries in the coal mine.” He further asks, “What’s out there killing the canaries that will eventually take down the rest of us too?” These are important questions to explore, and Strode’s decision to place them within an absorbing personal narrative makes them all the more engaging and relatable.
A thoughtful memoir of recovery and empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9798891381384
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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