A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.
The acclaimed farmer, novelist, and environmental essayist considers—and grumbles about—our current racial reckonings.
Berry has been writing about race for much of his career. His 1970 book, The Hidden Wound, considered the impact of slavery and its aftereffects on the country in general and his native Kentucky in particular. In essence, his approach hasn’t changed. He still advocates for tightknit communities that are, if not actively agrarian, at least compassionate toward the environment; from there, he suggests, balms to many social ills will naturally arrive. This digressive, at times exhausting book is at best a well-meaning, eloquent utopian plea to abandon urbanity; at worst, it lapses into all-lives-matter rhetoric insisting that slavery and the Confederacy, while wrongheaded, were misunderstood. Berry finds recent efforts to remove Confederate monuments to be unhelpful, leading to an extended consideration of Robert E. Lee as “one of the great tragic figures of our history, who embodied and suffered in his personal life our national tragedy.” The author also argues that most Confederate soldiers were not necessarily White supremacists but rather unfairly maligned just-following-orders types. “Whatever there may have been of kindness in slavery does not excuse it,” he writes later, “and whatever was most cruel does not typify it.” In his effort to seek nuance in racial divisions, Berry risks being misunderstood, which he acknowledges. The deeper problem is that he cherry-picks where he goes looking for nuance. He laments the Great Migration without considering its causes; curiously, mentions Jim Crow only in passing; and laments the loss of Confederate statues but doesn’t consider the option of elevating other communities in their places. The hardworking Amish farm he describes certainly sounds lovely, but his prescription that we somehow build a country from that kind of model is as impractical as any bureaucratic approach he has railed against in the past.
A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-8-9856798-0-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Shoemaker & Company
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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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