Shannon Wheeler

This lampoon of The Donald gets it all wrong, start to finish. Charles Chaplin once said that had he known about the Holocaust he never would have made The Great Dictator. The cartoonist treats The Donald as a clueless, mischievous, yet somehow cuddly toddler. That approach might work for some (cf. L'il Bush), but Bush 43 was a pious bumbler, not a dangerously incompetent megalomaniac. By trivialzing Trump, she misses his malevolence and long-term danger to democracy. Moreover, many if not show more most of her cartoons could just as easily be seen as agreeing with Trump's nonsense. Worst of all, one has to read the tweets themselves and all too often one has to wade through four or five of them to get to a cartoon. I know that her somewhat childish 'tooning style is all the rage these days, but I didn't especially care for it. show less

Well this book was incredibly generic and largely not insightful on the comedy front.

As a person who grew up reading things like Captain Underpants and Bart Simpson's Guide to Life, reading comics like Peanuts and Dilbert, and watching shows like The Simpsons and Seinfeld, I've had a long life full of comedy and sass. I LOVE to laugh, I love sarcasm and wit and things that are just meant to be FUNNY and enjoyable. I tend to enjoy random, fun, light-reading, but this book only met the show more "light-reading" mark in that it was lightweight when it comes to comedy and it goes by really quick (thank goodness for that, if I had to look at another one of these deplorable sketches I think I'd lose my mind due to the lack of real inspiration or hilarity). This is just too typical. ANY Trump hater on the street could have put this together. I thought I was gonna get something especially fun and laugh worthy, but I basically just found your run-of-the-mill online comment section sentiment as expressed through generic illustration.

Hate him or like him, I feel like Trump says more, for better or worse, in 140 characters than this book was able to in 120 pages. I was most looking forward to seeing the illustrations, and while some are amusing, they generally look like they could have been doodled by a high school student who is bored (no offense to you bored high schoolers who have SERIOUS artistic talent and skill).

I really came into this one wanting to laugh and found that there was nothing to laugh about or be amused with apart from the fact that it convinced me to waste my time. But hey, it counts for my reading challenge this year, so that will make me win bigly in the end. Tremendous disappointment. Better luck next time, Wheeler. show less

"What do we call it?" After a few abortive suggestions, all of which I'm glad we turned down, we started to focus in on "God is Disappointed in You," which is the perfect title for this book, because if I had to condense the entire Bible down to a single phrase, that would be it.

God is Disappointed in You took me significantly longer to read than I had initially assumed. The Bible can be quite dull subject matter, especially for a non-Christian. That being said, I truly did enjoy this book. show more Religion can be such a serious, touchy subject for many people, so I don't know that this book is for everyone, as I can see the more devout being offended at the language and seemingly lackadaisical attitude expressed towards one of the worlds most "holy" of books.

Most of the Old Testament is about land battles and genealogies (or as Russell states, God's attempt at scrap-booking) and God smiting or promising to smite people. And there is a reason that a lot of Christians (at least the ones that I personally know) have never actually read the entire Bible. It's dull. I think Leviticus is my favorite example of this, but Russell was able to even make that chapter interesting to me.

God is Disappointed in You's setup is basically that each chapter of the Bible has a corresponding chapter in there. They are not always just straight prose either. For example, Psalms was written in the form of a "Greatest Hits" album, several books followed the form of emails or memos, Habakkuk was a Q&A, Hebrews was in FAQ form, etc. Having read the majority of the Old Testament, I can speak to the veracity of that particular section, and the humor that Russell brought to it was very amusing.

I also learned several things I didn't know before. Like, for example, how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all the same damn story just told by different people. No author today could get away with that kind of repetition. Russell tired to make them each individually interesting, but you can read the same story only so many times before you get tired of it. And the rest of the New Testament, with the exception of Revelations, is basically just a bunch of letters from apostles. So there's that.

TLDR: Loved this irreverent view of the Bible, and I will actually be buying this book as soon as I get done with this review. Yes, I loved it that much.

ARC courtesy of Top Shelf Productions, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

Duin and Wheeler cherrypick the Mueller Report to make a scathing case against Donald Trump for obstructing justice in this graphic adaptation.

It's a quick read packed with information, but don't expect a rigorous work of nonfiction. First, the authors have Mueller acting as a narrator and put words in his mouth. In checking their footnotes against the original report, it quickly comes apparent how much more information they are skimming past and how often they are attributing paraphrasing show more as direct quotes.

I was annoyed by the erratic footnoting of the people and their occupations or relation to the report that appeared on the bottom of the story pages. The notes often did not appear on the page of the person's initial appearance and started repeating toward the end for people who had already had a footnote. And it seems silly to include a cast of characters in the rear of the book that mostly includes only the person's last name but then occasionally includes several people's first name. It just gives the appearance of sloppy editing, cutting further into the credibility of the adaptation.

Regardless, this makes for a nice overview for a casual reader and anti-Trumper who doesn't want to slog through the dreary text of the original report. show less