A heartfelt look at burnout and recovery.
Entrepreneur and life coach Anderson derives inspirational life lessons from reflecting on his personal diary in this memoir and self-help book.
The debut author begins his meditation on vulnerability with a memory of when he was at his most vulnerable and contemplating suicide. From that lowest point, he managed to find a way back to healthy living, and in this book, he reflects on that path, drawing on his own journal entries from the time in order to create a blueprint that others might find helpful. Those entries start in 2014 and are immediately involving, taking readers directly into Anderson’s life with his partner, called C., and their cats—a seemingly happy time. But stressors were already threatening this idyllic existence, and they eventually come to dominate the story. Throughout, Anderson includes a section of a diary entry, such as “I’m often bad at taking time off for myself. Instead I try to do stuff for everyone else and forget about myself, classic Thomas,” and then offers his present-day thoughts on what he was going through: “Prior to this diary entry, I normally had time to myself; I didn’t have to think about and understand the quiet that I needed.” Quickly and steadily, a clear picture emerges of a man paying no attention to his own needs as pressures piled up. In the course of his journey, Anderson sought improvement wherever he could, from cutting added sugar out of his diet to adding exercise and yoga to his routine, and the cumulative effect is touching and intensely relatable. Readers will nod in recognition at such sentiments as “If we don’t dare to feel or face the risk of being hurt, we miss out on so much,” and perhaps learn something from the author’s personal revelations that they can put to good use in their own lives.
A heartfelt look at burnout and recovery.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-9-15-190938-7
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Trignite
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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