Michael Ian Black

A little girl's to-do list out grows her in this silly read which hits home for more than just young readers.

There is so much to do, especially with the first day of school only two weeks away. This little girl is determined to stay on top of things and use her time in the most productive way possible. After all, in only 12 years, she needs to fill out college applications. Her calendar is chucked full, but her friends insist that they want to spend some time with her, too. Playing in the show more mud is an important past time. But not everything fits in!

This book immediately puts a smile on the face (whether that of a child or an adult), hitting home with all age groups. The disaster on the cover is exactly the tone that these pages hold...and it also hints at the fun. With friends like Flamingo and Potato...so fun to watch these two..., enjoyment is guaranteed. The humor snuggles up tightly to the more serious issue of over-packing a schedule and forgetting down-time. It's a great balance between messaging and entertainment and brings the point across clearly but with smiles and giggles, too.

The illustrations and text work hand-in-hand to create a seamless read. The text is light and brings across personality and plot with direct statements. The illustrations do the same on the visual side, while remaining bright and bold. Both offer dabs of clever humor, back-and-forth, making sure to cooperate the entire way through. This creates a fun read-aloud even for more reluctant listeners and also works for beginning readers to pick up on their own. show less

Mostly Solid (More Than Jello, Less Than Steak) Advice From Father To Son On The Event Of The Son Leaving For College. And with that long-ass title out of the way... :D Seriously, this is a near-perfect letter of advice about life, love, and other mysteries from father to son as the son heads off to college and happens to have a celebrity dad. His statements about mass shootings are 100% incorrect in a couple of places, and his statements about Ayn Rand and White Guilt are philosophically show more incorrect (but in line with expectations given his own liberal philosophy), but otherwise what Black writes here rings true. And nearly as importantly, the love for his son rings through even louder than any moral or philosophical point he makes here. This is a type of letter than nearly any man wishes his dad would have left him, and Black truly does an excellent job of showing his own thinking and philosophies about the various issues discussed. In the end, I personally would love a celebrity from the right - as well as one of the very few celebrity anarchists such as possibly Woody Harrelson - to write similar public letters for their own kids, as between the three one would likely get an even stronger overall look at the topic at hand. But for exactly what it is, this truly is a phenomenal work with a quibble here or there, and very much recommended. show less

It starts with a school shooting. The mass murderer, as always, was a boy. Michael Black has a boy too -luckily, he was in a different school although in the same city when the shooting happened. Why is it always boys engaging in such senseless violence? Such event triggered him indeed to reflect upon masculinity, manhood, and how we raise our sons in a culture still carrying within itself the heritage of the patriarchal model (it’s about the USA, but many points will resonate with how we show more perceive traditional manhood across the whole Western world…), reflections that he, here, offers to his son, himself on its way to become a man. And here’s the multi-million pounds question: is masculinity ‘toxic’?

We live a time of reckoning, especially following the #MeToo campaign whereas how men think, approach, treat, and overall behave around women brought to the fore how inappropriate (to say the least…) some of the attitudes and thinking rooted in traditional manhood are. Writing to his teenage son about to go to College, Michael Black therefore takes the more than welcome opportunity to provide insight to boys as to what constitute consent and respecting women’s boundaries (no guys, women are not ‘a mystery’; they’re actually pretty simple to understand, and it all boils down to respect and decency… duh!). Traditional manhood, then, surely contains its fair share of ‘toxic’ behaviours that we all have to face. Does it mean, though, that masculinity itself is ‘toxic’?

He doesn’t think so. He argues, on the contrary, that the traits we’ve been traditionally associating with manhood (strength, courage, independence, discipline) ought to be encouraged, for they’re the seed to a strong and positive character. It’s a fair point, but, personally, I think it’s (a tat) missing the mark. Indeed, I personally think that, first and foremost, such traits are no longer considered specifically ‘masculine’ (they never were; socialisation and the patriarchal model had boxed us all into such narrow labels – something he doesn’t deny, to be fair- and women are no less aggressive or violent than men are empathetic and nurturing). Then, because the issue is not such traits per se but how they are interpreted, and, so, how they translate into our behaviours. He, himself, acknowledges just that, by debunking a few assumptions surrounding what a man should be -you can be vulnerable without being weak; strength is about resilience more than it should be about violence and aggression; and independence shouldn’t mean staunch individualism negating others. I agree on all points.

So, upon closing such welcome reflections, what is it all about?

All in all, it’s a book about love. It’s about the love of a dad for his son, and an affirmation that men can be loved too for being men -we’re not all potential rapists and murderers finding meaning and identity in violence! We’re more than that, and we deserve to be perceived as more than that. Amen! There’s surely something terribly wrong with the way we still socialise men, but it belongs to us all to change that for the better. Everything starts at home, after all. show less

In this collection of humorous essays, Black takes stereotypes and turns them upside down and twists them into satirical caricatures. From a chapter mocking over-zealous party-goers to a monologue from a self-loathing high school football coach, Black has a range of memorable characters and events that give endless variety to a book that could have been very monotonous. The beautiful thing about his work is that the author never outrightly mocks anything. Instead, he uses skillful show more exaggeration and the point-of-view of the type of person he is skewering to effectively commentate on society...and to make us laugh. Of course, there are the obligatory sex jokes, and some of the essays seemed a bit boring and pointless. Annoyingly, Black also recycled some jokes that brought down what otherwise would have been near-flawless prose. But dominating the book is a great sense of humor - reading every essay is fun, and in the last sentence of each, Black delivers a punch line that is perfectly timed and immediately effective. show less