An impassioned defense of interconnectedness.
Hope in a time of grief.
Environmental activist Williams, who teaches a class at Harvard’s Divinity School called “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” (also the title of one of her previous books) elaborates on that theme in her celebration of Glorians. A Glorian, she explains, “is an encounter…a meeting with élan vital…a moment of grace.” It can be an ant carrying an unwieldy flower petal to an ant hill, or a desert landscape “alive with creatures aligned with darkness.” In chapters that range from brief meditations to longer narratives, Williams bears witness “to beauty and brokenness, love and grief.” Among the most moving pieces are elegies to the dead: her friend, nature writer Barry Lopez; the Great Salt Lake, a victim of drought; and one beloved tree. She recounts the futile protests that arose when plans to build an addition to the Divinity School entailed cutting down a centuries-old red oak. For Williams and the many others who protested, the Divinity Tree was a living being deserving of honor—which, Williams reveals, was eventually achieved. Many pieces reflect on landscape and environment, as Williams travels between Utah, where she and her husband make their home in the desert, and Cambridge, where she lives in a small apartment and misses her animal companions. Marriage, friendship, dreams, ravaging fires, her aging father, the pandemic, all feature in deeply felt pieces. Just as Lopez “exhorted his readers to see attention as love,” Williams advises, “We can resist despair and complacency and act lovingly, fiercely on behalf of life in all its beautiful and endless manifestations with neighbors, friends, and colleagues.” Grace can be found in empathy, not only with one another, but with the wondrous presences of the natural world.
An impassioned defense of interconnectedness.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780802165848
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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