This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading.
The author of Heartland returns with a collection of pieces that illuminate the plights and humanity of her working-class subjects.
“The White, rural, working-poor people about whom I most often write—they are your people too,” writes Smarsh in the introduction to this compendium of 36 essays, the majority of which originally appeared in a range of publications. The author possesses a distinct style, one simultaneously personal and political, with the aim of navigating “the space where storytelling might be at once factual in content and artistic in form.” In her essays, which range from two to 18 pages, she makes frequent references to her own experiences. “I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer parks,” she writes in a 2014 essay about “the teeth of poor folk,” which criticizes America’s costly dental care system and humanizes those who are unable to afford treatment. She calls for the American dream “to put its money where its mouth is” with different laws and “individual awareness of the judgments we pass on people.” Another essay describes Smarsh’s brother, a first-generation college graduate who “had no connections in the professional world, and no one to tell him that communications and history degrees were bad bets to begin with.” As she recounts, he regularly sold his plasma over the course of a decade to make ends meet. In a piece about growing wheat in Kansas, the author writes, “The greater divide in America today is not between red and blue but between what is discussed in powerful rooms and what is understood in the field.” Even though these essays were shaped by more than a dozen editors, this collection’s impact is staggering, and Smarsh’s voice is constant, studied, and compassionate.
This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668055601
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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