A profound lesson in how to hear the world anew.
On the intimate art of listening well.
We raise girls to be good listeners in a world of men. As a music journalist, Vincent had made a career out of listening. She listened in clubs, at concerts, and to mostly male artists in her interviews. Music was omnipresent, essential to her life as a teen and young adult. Now in her 30s, she found herself surrounded by silence. “If I tried to unpick how I’d grown from a girl who thrived among the dissonance of a punk record into a woman who preferred to be in silence, I got caught in tangles,” she writes. Then, into that silence came her baby’s heartbeat from a monitor. Later, she heard his cry. In this moving and brilliant book, Vincent examines not just sound but what it means to listen. She explores the quiet sounds of domesticity, motherhood, and the quotidian—often overlooked, feminine sounds. She reflects on what she hears at Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, in the near-mythic sound of the aurora borealis—which has been described as sheets of paper rubbing together—from national security translators, and in the practice of Deep Listening. “I want to make the quiet loud,” she declares, and that is exactly what she does. Her quiet is populated by many brilliant women, including researchers and scientists of sound, while her own journey of motherhood makes vivid the ways in which a mother’s biology is rewired to respond to their child’s sound. Speaking with a deaf artist, Vincent challenges her preconceptions that “being without sound was to suffer,” instead learning “a different way of listening,” one rich in community and creativity. Though the book takes place in many quiet spaces, the reverberations are loud, and the author’s descriptions evocative. From excellent research on those elements of noise that are often overlooked yet build the fabric of our daily lives, Vincent weaves a tapestry of sound and understanding.
A profound lesson in how to hear the world anew.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781837260775
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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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