Cozy, writerly advice and analysis delivered in a restrained, welcoming manner.
A veteran author of the craft extolls the many rewards of literature.
In his third nonfiction book, novelist and short story writer Baxter unites the “personal and impersonal, the subjective and the objective.” He describes “Wonderland” as a “small but important subcontinent of Literature” where the “setting is as alive as the characters are, if not more so….The House of Usher looks out at you as you approach it. When you think of Stephen King’s or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, you think of the Overlook Hotel, which has a mind of its own, as does Poe’s House of Usher.” In the first essays, Baxter gently delves into the intriguing technique of how requests, like Lady Macbeth’s request that Macbeth kill Duncan, often set “stories with a particular urgency into motion.” The author ponders how some characters’ strange names—Ahab, Flem Snopes, Bathsheba Everdene—“are their story.” After “being used, the name has been retired.” He notes that “something in the nature of fiction loves inventories and lists,” as he works his way through works by Ayad Akhtar, Thomas Hardy, and William Maxwell. In a nostalgic piece about the author “curator,” Baxter champions writers who preserve “what everyone else is discarding” or forgetting. Rather than just letting a narrative simmer, some writers like to heat it up “in order to cook properly.” Even Chekhov, a master of the “low-temperature situation,” sometimes lets things “boil over,” as in Uncle Vanya. Baxter also probes Under the Volcano’s use of a “hot and often extravagant style” in a postmodernist age that encourages the “cooler end of the emotional spectrum.” In a lengthy, incisive piece on charisma, Baxter writes that in “our literature, America is a breeding ground of confidence men,” pointing to Muriel Spark’s “female Ahab” in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (“reading it is a bit like watching laboratory mice jumping around after being given periodic shocks”) and James McBride’s John Brown in The Good Lord Bird.
Cozy, writerly advice and analysis delivered in a restrained, welcoming manner.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64445-091-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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