RavePittsburgh Post-Gazette...[an] absorbing graphic novel about grief, depression and the Information Age ... A theme throughout this finely wrought novel is that information technology bestows far more communicative power than anyone can responsibly wield ... In a prescient early scene, the two men are sitting on Calvin’s couch, drinking beer and watching a TV special on the 16th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks...The words appear as closed captioning in black boxes, even though the men are presumably watching it with the sound on, caption-free. This is one in an arsenal of clever devices Mr. Drnaso uses to represent talk radio, cell-phone chatter and all the other inhuman noise that carries the human voice ... Sabrina is drawn in a smooth ligne claire style with simple human figures and lush backgrounds digitally colored in pastel hues ... he is a master at modulating the intensity of light ... Like any fine novelist, he is unafraid to confront us with the terrible facts of how people really live.
David Sedaris
RaveThe Pittsburgh Post-Gazette\"These essays are less zany than his earlier work (although you’ll still laugh out loud). Instead, he has mastered the art of modulation, weaving together grief with silliness, the joys of life with the fact of death ... His best comedy is not only unserious but anti-serious, a vindication of frivolousness in a time of moral hand-wringing ... If he sometimes comes off as flippant, so what. Mr. Sedaris is a prime entertainer, and so he cannot be a moralist.\
Tom Wolfe
MixedThe Pittsburgh Post-GazetteThe Kingdom of Speech seems to teach us that for something as varied and idiosyncratic as human language, there will never be one theory to explain the starkness of Pirahã, the 100-syllable nouns of Sanskrit poetry, the melodic stutter of Italian, or the countless other features that make one language different from another. But I say 'seems' because in the final chapter, against all expectations, Mr. Wolfe indulges in his own utterly flawed theory of language ... It’s an odd ending for a book that rejects exactly this kind of philosophizing. The fact is, if we take what Mr. Wolfe says seriously, then we must discount what Mr. Wolfe says.
