A unique re-creation of a great life in a largely vanished world. Bada bing, bada boom!
An eminent cultural figure finds a funny way to tell his life story.
Hirsch, a poet, a bestselling author, and the president of the Guggenheim Foundation for more than two decades, channels the voices and personalities of his Chicagoland Jewish childhood to create a memoir composed of jokes and short vignettes, one setup-and-punchline after another—probably surprising himself as much as the reader when the gimmick holds up for nearly 300 pages, until the author leaves home for college at Grinnell, where an angry high school French teacher lobbied madly to prevent his admission because of a profane question he posed about Santa Claus at a senior assembly. Though he’s toned it down a bit since the days of using the f-word in high school, in essence he’s still that guy: sometimes silly, sometimes off-color, often Yiddish-flavored, with a penchant for puns and dad jokes that never quits. Here is an entry titled “Brain Sale”: “‘If we sold everyone’s brains,’ my grandmother said to me, ‘I’d charge the most for yours.’ ‘Why, because I’m the smartest one in the family?’ ‘No, because yours have never been used.’” Another entry is “Celebratory Dinner”: “Whenever I got laryngitis, my mom served steak to celebrate the fact that I couldn’t talk. That was tough to swallow.” A wonderful section recounting the fate of a series of aquatic pets is titled “The Goldfish Variations.” All the jokes don’t stop him from filling in along the way the details of his quirky mother, his two fathers, his siblings and his extended Jewish family, his sports achievements and romantic conquests, and the Jewish migration to the suburbs. Particularly telling is one of the final sections, “How To Remember Childhood”: “This book is dedicated to my sister Lenie. We lived through everything together. We share a sense of humor and a history. She has vetted my stories, but she also remembers our childhood as traumatic. I prefer to recall it otherwise. Her way was more expensive. It required psychoanalysis.”
A unique re-creation of a great life in a largely vanished world. Bada bing, bada boom!Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802823
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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