Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.
A provocative memoir of personal essays exploring race, identity, and queer love.
In his debut essay collection, first-generation Chinese American writer Dai crafts an intricate tapestry of memory and reflection through lush, impressionistic prose. The book ambitiously explores themes of identity, race, language, love, and queerness, framed by Dai’s travels across the U.S.—from Tennessee to Arizona—and back to his ancestral homeland in China. Dai’s exploration of identity begins poignantly with his name—Thomas versus Nuocheng—offering a compelling entry point: “Thomas gets me through the roll call quicker….It is the name on my driver’s license and passport, a word whose primary synonym in my head is me.” What follows is stylistically profound yet often veers into self-conscious territory. The narrative is peppered with references to influential thinkers like Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, and Vladimir Nabokov, suggesting Dai’s thoughts are filtered through their sensibilities. He reflects, “For so long, I have thought about love as a feeling that lives and dies in the moment. I have thought about love through the words of philosophers like Barthes and Badiou rather than poets like Audre Lorde—Lorde, who writes, breathlessly describing a lover’s touch, ‘I am come home.’” This intellectual approach sometimes results in opaque descriptions, particularly when describing relationships with family and lovers—two of whom are referred to simply as “J” or “you.” Stark black-and-white photos attempt to enhance his written impressions but add to the book’s somewhat elusive quality. Dai’s prose oscillates between clarity and dense, stylized writing. At its best, it offers insightful reflections on the immigrant experience and queer identity. However, the weight of its intellectual indulgences sometimes threatens to overshadow the personal narrative. The work will likely resonate with readers drawn to lush prose and literary experimentation, but it may leave others yearning for more grounded, accessible storytelling.
Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781324066378
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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 pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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