Nearly three years ago, on December 19, 2022, Eric Grode in the New York Times was the first to mention publicly that I had a book on the horizon, at the time titled “Matching Minds With Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Master Lyricist.”

So it feels like the completion of an arc that today a nearly 4,000 word review appeared in The New Yorker, the two publications being my father’s privileged papers of record.

Writer Michael Schulman (whom I met during his reporting on the book when he came to my Sondheimian Games Nights event at Mohonk Mountain House) essentially takes the reader on a guided tour of my research. I couldn’t ask for a better platform for helping new readers discover the book, especially as this is their annual Cartoons and Puzzles issue. I love when he wrote that my creating the book was like entering the plot of Sondheim’s film The Last of Sheila: “Its plot is reminiscent not only of the Murder Game but of Joseph’s book: the master of ceremonies has died, and the biographer is left to sort out the clues.” (Michael later wrote on social media, “This was the most I had writing anything all year.”)

Here is a link to the full piece and below I’ll quote in full the two paragraphs where he situates my book in the history of Sondheim historiography, calls it “clever and appropriately obsessive,” and generally says complimentary things:

Sondheim’s death, in 2021, has occasioned a flurry of books about his life and his singular influence on musical theatre. Only Barry Joseph has zeroed in on his sideline as a puzzles-and-games enthusiast. In his clever and appropriately obsessive “Matching Minds with Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend” (Bloomsbury), Joseph conducts a treasure hunt of his own, rummaging through memoirs and archives and surveying friends, collaborators, party planners, and jigsaw-puzzle designers to reconstruct a part of Sondheim’s œuvre which was mostly confined to his social circle. “It’s a whole side of me nobody knows,” Sondheim once said, though he did his best to downplay what he saw as a committed pastime. Constructing puzzles, he insisted, was “a minor form of a minor art.”

Joseph disagrees. “His puzzles and games should receive the same thoughtful consideration as his music,” he writes, while conceding that they formed “a footpath that ran along the main road of his life, one he would frequently travel.” Joseph, who designs educational games and co-founded the Games for Change Festival, is a polymath himself. His previous books include a history of seltzer, and he’s the director of something called the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum. The new book is itself a sort of puzzle box. The dedication is a word puzzle that I have yet to solve, and the back third comes with instructions on how to throw your own Sondheimian game night…”

Oh, and it came with an original Sondheim-themed cryptic crossword, constructed by a recent Jeopardy champion. Check it out here, and good luck!