A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.
A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.
As children, Brewer and her younger brother, Tomek, would peel sheets of skin off their fingers and palms—a sign of a vitamin deficiency—and compare who had torn off the most. They grew up in 1980s Poland, a country beset by political unrest and mired in an economic crisis. Store shelves were empty, fuel was scarce, and citizens queued for rations. Consequently, their family did what many rural Polish families have done for generations: forage for mushrooms and wild berries. “Mushroom hunting,” writes Brewer, “is a national sport in Poland.” She wonders whether her mercurial and alcoholic mother intentionally ate a poisonous mushroom to escape “a life she never wanted to live.” That suicide attempt was just one of many over the years. When things got too dicey at home, she and Tomek would walk to their grandparents’ house for food and love. “As with our beloved mushrooms,” writes the author, “my world was both toxic and lifegiving, and I learned to navigate Mother’s land mines, to receive her blows, and to recover on Grandma’s lap, regaining strength to weather the next family crisis.” Interspersed throughout the book are recipes from her childhood, including fish aspic, fermented rye soup, and bigos, a stew of sauerkraut, sausage, and, of course, mushrooms. Brewer’s psychic wounds may have not yet fully healed—“As wpadka, a birth-control accident, I will never know whether I was wanted”—but now a mother herself, she knows firsthand the demands of parenthood and how trauma passed down through generations can leave its mark. She can also recognize different sides of her mother: “her youthful enthusiasm, her love for animals, her sensitivity and creativity.”
A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780814258781
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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