An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.
A collection of web comics with a feline accent about life during the Covid-19 era.
Denver author/illustrator Acevedo (Steampunk Banditos, 2018, etc.) finds humor in the pandemic in 300 single-panel cartoons that show varied creatures—cats, mice, aliens, and fictional characters, such as Big Bird and the Cat in the Hat—reacting to its challenges. Introduced by the award-winning journalist and NPR contributor Peter Heller, the book begins with one of the best of its six sections: “Broken Mirror” finds its nonhuman subjects reacting to drone deliveries, Zoom meetings, social distancing, and out-of-control quarantine hair, and more. In a “Community Stress Test,” Acevedo adeptly sends up multitasking by depicting a mother cat feeding her kittens while texting on her phone. Many other entries have a similarly light or whimsical tone. In one, a cat peers out from a toilet-paper tower. Another tweaks Covid-related weight gains with an image of a cat trying to button its pants, which are now much too small. Other cartoons are more macabre, one features a cat getting its temperature taken at the Pearly Gates with a Plexiglas shield present. As with most such collections, this one seems designed to be kept on a coffee table and picked up when you need a smile, and some entries work better than others. Inspired in part by the work of B. Kliban and Gary Larson, the black-and-white, pen-and-pencil illustrations are generally clear and to the point but occasionally hard to interpret: What are we to make of a drawing of an Aztec god buying food from a taco truck? But Acevedo, who once drew award-winning editorial cartoons for a Texas newspaper, doesn’t shy away from political disagreements and civil unrest related to the pandemic. Nor does he ignore the daily struggle of sheltering in place in these cartoons, which first appeared in his daily social media posts. In short, this book has something for everyone—or at least everyone who believes that, even in a pandemic, cats can be funny.
An entertaining and sometimes pointed look at years in quarantine.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-647-0
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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