An exuberant handbook for making the world better.
A fun book about “the edges of science, the limits of what’s currently possible thanks to the technology that humans have already invented or are currently inventing.”
North, an Eisner Award–winning writer for Marvel Comics, offers an entertaining manual illustrated with suitably farcical drawings by comics artist Monardo, imparting detailed advice for becoming a supervillain with the intention of tyrannizing everything and everyone in the universe. With a career spent designing “increasingly credible world-domination schemes,” North has confidence that they could work, even though in the world of comics those schemes are always foiled by superheroes. Nevertheless, prospective supervillains would do well to find a secret base for subversive activities, establish a separate country, and unleash aggressive animals, such as dinosaurs, revived through cloning. In addition, supervillains will want to control the weather, manage the power of the internet, and achieve enduring fame, if not physical immortality. Though North’s proposals are outlandish, he grounds them in physics, biology, history, geology, zoology, computer science, genetics, paleontology, and cryogenics, not to mention politics and international law. He suggests, for example, three ways to take land away from someone else to start your own country (through stealth, force, or persuasion), and he enumerates the pros and cons of taking over Antarctica. At each step, he offers a timeline and cost analysis. As for dealing with climate change, “an obvious solution presents itself to even the neophyte supervillain: take over the world and use your iron fist to crush anyone who even thinks about emitting carbon.” Supervillains and heroes alike often face obstinate foes, requiring them to wield political influence. “The way you force people in power to do what you want,” North writes, “is by ensuring that they fear you.” The author’s spoof contains a serious subtext: The world has lots of problems—climate change, war, inequality, computer hackers, disease, and rampant greed, among others—that can be addressed through understanding, focus, and determination. Knowledge, he proposes, is the greatest superpower of all.
An exuberant handbook for making the world better.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-19201-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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