An entertainingly zany collection of sketches poking fun at the foibles of contemporary life at every age.
Two comic writers join forces in this collection of satirical scenarios and verses.
Dynamic duo Shaw and Kronengold met at Yale in 2014. Since then, they’ve become a sensation as the youngest-ever writers for the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Their debut volume assembles an array of pieces separated into the stages of human life, from childhood through college and adulthood. An immediate standout is the opening story, “We Have Your Son,” in which a youth kidnapping-and-ransom operation is hilariously hijacked by indifferent parents (“Keep him!”). Throughout, it’s clear that the authors consistently let their imaginations run wild. Some pieces are effervescently silly (“Dr. Seuss Teaches Safe Sex”); some are freeform and whimsical; others are more creatively inspired glimpses into unwieldy fantasies and modern dilemmas of postgraduate life. The authors are particularly successful in their portrayal of adolescence, from melodramatic dispatches from summer camp and a horror satire featuring a courageous girl who finds herself in Hell, which she recognized “because it was very hot and ‘Moves Like Jagger’ was playing on a loop.” Some of the collection’s more personal pieces are also the most engaging and memorable, including “College Stories Fact Check,” in which the authors share amusing memories from their time together as Yale students; others include a transcript of text conversations with their drug dealer and an assessment of their shared experience in Hollywood as “skilled practitioners of asskissery.” The text contains more than 30 stories, perhaps best read over numerous sittings. In any such book, a few pieces fall flat, but each one contains at least some flashes of comic brilliance, making it clear this is a hyper-creative pair with immense potential. Saturated with creative energy and a healthy funny bone, these stories are comedy gold.
An entertainingly zany collection of sketches poking fun at the foibles of contemporary life at every age.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063215788
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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