Haunting and lovely: Readers will eagerly join Nesi in his remembrances.
A beautiful and heartbreaking account of how the author—and the world—navigated the early part of the pandemic.
At just over two years into this yet-to-end global pandemic, it’s sensible to question if books tackling the experience are a “too soon” item. Nesi, who won the Strega Prize for Story of My People, gracefully handles that exact challenge in this lush work, translated from Italian. Ranging from economics to love and countless stops in between, the author filters his discussions through the lens of what unfolded during 2020 and how it affected business, politics, the arts, and global health. “What types of work, after all, are now to be considered unnecessary, not crucial, and dispensable,” asks Nesi, “if the work in question allows a people to survive?” The author generously synthesizes his personal experiences, taking readers with him as he chronicles his visits to places such as markets and town squares, places of business, and the beach, where he went to rest. Through it all, he laments the changes brought about by unpredictable viruses, giving readers permission to mourn the world that was and reflect on the time when we moved freely, indulged and enjoyed life, and socialized with little understanding of its fragility. Nesi is in a unique position to examine the material things that consumers value in a world that has shuttered. In the new normal, Tuscany, where the author lives, cannot fully stem the worry and constant sense of doom and uncertainty—a situation faced by people across the world. Despite repeated references to the idea that nothing new has come about since the 1970s and that we are instead moving within a “maximum possible point of development,” Nesi sprinkles hope throughout the book. It's not easy to stitch economics and emotions together on the page, but the author accomplishes it with aplomb.
Haunting and lovely: Readers will eagerly join Nesi in his remembrances. (N/A)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-214-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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