"Kreider locates the right simile and the pith of situations as he carefully catalogues humanity's inventive and manifold ways of failing" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).Satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn't change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don't even like? What do you do when a friend becomes obsessed with a political movement and won't let you ignore it?
Irreverent yet earnest, he shares deeply personal experiences and readily confesses his vices-betraying his addiction to lovesickness, for example, and the gray area that he sees between the bold romantic gesture and the illegal act of stalking.
Here, we witness Kreider's tight-knit crew struggle to deal with a pathologically-lying friend who won't ask for help. We watch him navigate a fraught relationship with a lonely uncle in jail who-as he degenerates into madness-continues to plead for the support of his conflicted nephew. And we cringe as he gets outed as a "moby" at a Tea Party rally.
Uncompromisingly candid, sometimes mercilessly so, these comically illustrated essays are rigorous exercises in self-awareness and self-reflection. These are the conversations you only have with best friends or total strangers, late at night over drinks, near closing time.
Industry Reviews
"We Learn Nothing articulated, for me, more human truths than any book in recent memory. When you're done with it, it almost feels like finishing a textbook: you actually feel like you understand how things work a little better."-- "PublishersWeekly.com"
"Amazing . . . Any thinking person with a sense of humor will find We Learn Nothing provocative and delightful, reminiscent, in varying ways, of David Foster Wallace, James Thurber, David Sedaris, and Susan Sontag."--Jennifer Finney Boylan "author of She's Not There"
"In a political atmosphere as angry as this, [Kreider's] oblique, self-deprecating commentary may be the only angle to which party loyalists on either side are likely to respond. We Learn Nothing should be their required reading."-- "Willamette Week (Portland, Ore.)"
"Tim Kreider may be the most subversive soul in America and his subversions--by turns public and intimate, political and cultural--are just what our weary, mixed-up nation needs. The essays in We Learn Nothing are for anybody who believes it's high time for some answers, damn it."--Richard Russo "Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls"
"Whether he is expressing himself in highly original cartoons that are hilarious visual poems, or in prose that exposes our self-delusions by the way he probes his own experience with candor, Tim Kreider is a writer-artist who brilliantly understands that every humorist at his best is a liberator. Because he is irreverent, makes us laugh, ruffles the feathers of the pretentious and the pompous, and keeps us honest, We Learn Nothing is a pleasure from its first page to the last."--Charles Johnson "bestselling author of Middle Passage"
