Though gentler than its title suggests, an intelligent and entertaining read.
Unexpectedly charming personal essays about disillusionment, diabetes, and despair.
Like her first book, Slaughterhouse 90210, Kreizman’s essay collection is anchored in her love of popular culture and takes its title from a Great Moment in Television. “In the final season of Mad Men, after Peggy and Joan have spent years clawing their way to the middle of their fictional advertising agency,” they have a meeting with the new owners of the firm during which the continued reign of the grossest kind of misogyny is confirmed. Afterward, Peggy asks Joan if she wants to get lunch, and Joan replies, “I want to burn this place down.” To Kreizman, this is a symbol of all the times she herself has had to learn that “working hard and playing by the rules can be futile and demeaning if the game itself has always been rigged.” While she opines convincingly about various societal issues—climate change, health care, corporate capitalism—the personal remains at the heart of her work, and some of the best essays are about her experience with diabetes, shedding light on the wider experience of chronic illness. It’s the writing that makes it sing: “Puberty beat the shit out of me in unique and astounding ways. My hormones, surging like a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke when you open it immediately after you’ve dropped it on the floor, caused my blood sugar to rise and fall and rise even higher with seemingly no correspondence to the insulin I was taking or the food I was eating.” Another standout is titled “Copaganda and Me,” in which she wrestles with the fact that after their shared childhood watching police shows on television, she grew up alienated while “[m]y brothers grew up and became cops, both of them. Twin Jewish cops.” Along with righteous anger, there’s plenty of sweetness, with evocative passages about her New Jersey childhood and paeans to her very happy union with a nice man named Josh. “I’m perpetually astonished to find that marriage is one of the only institutions that has not disappointed me.”
Though gentler than its title suggests, an intelligent and entertaining read.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780063305823
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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