From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
There are plenty of drawings in this memoir by cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, but it's the writing that gets me. He tells it informally, in chunks, lingering on details, not worrying about fleshing them out. I really loved it. Recommended By Britt A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Here is the first non-fiction book by Bruce Eric Kaplan.
It is a book wholly unique in form and feeling.
This memoir is both full of wonder and anxiety, and is altogether side-splitting and heart-breaking.
Above all, it captures what it was like for Bruce Eric Kaplan, and perhaps some of you, to be a child.
Review
"This is a wonderful, touching, and funny book." Roz Chast, author of National Book Award finalist Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Review
"Bruce Eric Kaplan's beautiful memoir, I Was a Child, does what
his deceptively simple drawings do: takes complicated
feelings — here the baffling questions, the confinement, and the
secret freedom of childhood — and makes them funny and unsettling
and achingly sad. Anyone who was a child will love it." Maile Meloy, author of The Apprentices and The Apothecary
Review
"I Was a Child made me so happy and so sad at once. It is a sweet
and hilarious gut-puncher. That a memoir rooted in rage and confusion
could leave me aching with love, determined to forgive, and desperate
for 70's TV is glorious alchemy indeed." Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Review
"In his poetically illustrated memoir, Bruce Eric Kaplan manages to capture all that is beautiful, hilarious and painful about growing up human. He will make you laugh with recognition, cry with nostalgia and longing, and somehow wish you were growing up bored in New Jersey." Lena Dunham
Synopsis
A universally appealing and delightfully funny illustrated memoir from Bruce Eric Kaplan, the renowned New Yorker cartoonist.
About the Author
BRUCE ERIC KAPLAN, also known as BEK, is an American artist whose single-panel cartoons frequently appear in The New Yorker. He also has a whole other life as a television writer and producer.