A thoroughly enjoyable book that’ll leave you with a craving to get creative.
A woodworking ambassador shares the love of his craft.
Offerman’s talents extend beyond Hollywood to woodworking—a subject the actor explored in Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop (2016). In his latest book, he imparts his wisdom to younger readers. Yes, the book is for little woodchucks, as he endearingly calls them, but more grizzled neophytes will also benefit. Neither young nor old will be able to resist his folksy, dry wit. “Historically, everybody knows the easiest way to make a bench,” he writes. “First off, you need to locate your personal sittin’ parts, also known as the caboose, booty, or butt.…I usually find mine by determining the area halfway between my kneecaps and my armpits and then heading around back. If that doesn’t work, just put on some funky music and watch out for the part that first begins to shake.” More useful, perhaps, are the instructions for making a bench. As with all the projects—among them carved creatures, whistles, and box kites—this one comes with a handy list of materials and tools. A helpful photo shows all the tools laid out; a note reads, “power tools eventually die, but this hand drill has been in Lee’s family for 3 generations. Suck on that, capitalism.” “Lee” is Offerman’s co-author, Buchanan; they appear in photos alongside adorable kids hard at work, including one in which a mock-terrified Offerman is being transported on a forklift…operated by a tot. In an introduction that’s funny and earnest, Offerman rhapsodizes about the joys of making things with one’s hands. He observes, rightly, that “when we learn to make things for ourselves, we can then make things for other people, and that’s a great way to tell those folks that you love them.…Beyond the fondness that your new powers will engender, those tool skills will carry over into your everyday practice, and you’ll become a better thinker in every aspect of your life.”
A thoroughly enjoyable book that’ll leave you with a craving to get creative.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593475263
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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