A sometimes-grandiose but often captivating argument for the house as the framework for a vibrant life.
Witte encourages readers to find fulfillment in custom-designed homes in this architectural manifesto.
The author, an architect, mounts a wide-ranging critique of mass-produced American tract housing on many grounds—unsustainability, carbon footprint, the legacy of discriminatory redlining—but emphasizes its aesthetic and spiritual barrenness. A house, he asserts, should instead be “a piece of livable art” and “a stage that will perpetuate the wonders of your own and only being,” one that’s wildly creative—perhaps “burrowed into the earthen depths of a hill or flying high on stilts”—and dazzling enough to raise “goose bumps” (to procure such a home, he advises readers to hire an architectural firm and focus on the rapturous experiences the house will support rather than on the high price). Witte explores many aspects of housing and architecture, from construction costs to the feel of brick to the play of natural light through windows, including disquisitions on—and photos of—his own home designs. The houses he showcases are very modernist, with a rectilinearity softened by natural elements that feels like a mashup of Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright; they include the Gerendák Residence, which has sent visitors into fits of joyful weeping, and his own self-designed residence, which features nifty innovations like hollowed-out stairway steps for stowing shoes. The author’s paeans to the house as the smithy of the soul can sound overdone (“approach your design team asking for a built environment that allows you to be happier, more fulfilled, tickled by sensual riches, provided with more emotional depth, and enriched by a heightened sense of self”), but when he writes about specific buildings his vivid prose ably evokes the psychological impact of material structures (“The entry of the Pantheon famously tightens as you enter from the passages and small piazzas of the Eternal City, only to release you into a vast, open, round-domed space that ultimately culminates in a small oculus at its apex. A bird would fly right through”). The result is an absorbing brief for great architecture as a human necessity.
A sometimes-grandiose but often captivating argument for the house as the framework for a vibrant life.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781953555472
Page Count: 244
Publisher: SPARK Publications
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2023
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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