Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 12, 2024

This is the third of three posts listing the books I got from hamiltonbook.com, a great mail-order remainder dealer that I've been buying from for (big gasp) at least thirty years now. (I recommend them highly, as always: good prices, wide selection of random stuff, quick shipping, well packed. As long as you don't hate the idea of remainders to begin with, they are awesome.) This is the miscellaneous cluster, two non-fiction books and a few graphic novels.

A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues is a 2021 book by British psychologist Peter Hughes, which is, roughly, what the title promises: the stories of twenty-one statues that were destroyed. They're all over the world, they were torn down for all sorts of reasons, and Hughes has turned them into some kind of overall statement about the world and humans. It seems to have the famous ones - those Buddhas the Taliban dynamited, some Saddam Hussein statues, and at least one Confederate monument in the US - along with a lot of others I'm not familiar with. The topic was quirky, and, as a boring middle-aged man, I do like random nonfiction these days.

My Best Mistake is susbtantially more business-inspirational than I expected, which is a massive disappointment, but I'm still going to put it on the shelf, and may even read it some day. It's by Terry O'Reilly, and I thought it was more generally about mistakes rather than "and after I lost the Ajax account, it motivated me to CRUSH IT and dominate the entire world, BOOH-YAH!!!!" There are twenty-four chapters, all of which seem to be about pretty famous business things that were at least vaguely mistakes, seen in some lights, at some time.

Is This Guy For Real? is Box Brown's 2018 comics-format biography of Andy Kaufman. It's a book I've vaguely had on my list to buy and/or read for a long time, but I don't think I ever ran into a copy of it in the wild. I did read other Brown books over the last few years: in reverse order, Cannabis, Tetris, and Andre the Giant. And...yeah, that's pretty much it. Kaufman was fascinating; Brown is good at narrative non-fiction. I don't need to complicate things.

The Master and Margarita is a comics adaptation of the Mikhail Bulgakov novel - I have the recent translation of it on my shelves; I keep thinking I'm going to read that one "soon" - by Andrej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, both of whom seem to be Polish/British. From a quick look, I think Klimowski and Schejbal both illustrated this - the former the black and white pages; the latter the color pages - and I assume that they scripted and laid out the book together. So this is a quirky version of a quirky famous book, and I am usually in favor of quirky.

And last is Two Dead, a graphic novel from 2019 by Van Jensen and Nate Powell. I've been vaguely looking for this one for a few years, too - I think mostly because I've been following Powell's work for a while, though I think I've also seen good reviews of this one.