****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I have been a fan of Tim Kreider's since I came across a copy of "Why Do They Kill Me?", started flipping through and found the comics darkly hilarious and his comments attached to them by turns acid or sentimental in the best possible ways. I bought it on the spot. I loved his unrelenting cruelty toward conservatives in general and the Bush administration, because at the time I identified with the powerless rage at the absurd and awful things which happened then. I bought his other books over time and followed his work on his website. After Obama was elected, Tim lost a lot of the fire that was animating the rage that fueled his earlier work and his cartooning largely stopped. His site saw updates only rarely, and he started doing more writing. His writing had become my favorite part of his cartooning as I became more familiar with his voice, so when he announced that he was producing a book of long essays I was very excited.Tim has gotten older and wiser, and it is reflected in this book. His retrospective appraisal of his work during the Bush years is frank, of himself he says looking back at it makes him wince and think "what a sorehead" about the person who made it. Those turned off by vicious vitriol won't find a lot of it here. Largely ignoring the political sphere, he focuses on personal issues pretty much exclusively, which is rewarding for a long time reader like myself because I get to fill in the gaps where his older cartoons or writings hinted at things but never fleshed them out. That's not to say this book is only for the super fans: because he is an excellent writer, he manages to make a series of personal vignettes into powerful essays worth reading for anyone, about topics like friendship and family. In spite of the subject matter being well-trod over by just about every other writer there ever was, Tim manages to say it in a way that gives a fresh perspective or simply states it so well that one can't begrudge him for writing it down.
