Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.
A collection that shows Beattie “moonlighting as a nonfiction writer.”
In this entry in the publisher’s Nonpareil series, acclaimed novelist and short story writer Beattie offers a series of essays on literature, art, and photography. The author is an accomplished essayist with an elegant, precise writing style. Peter Taylor’s short stories “deepen, brushstroke by brushstroke, by gradual layering,” their surfaces “no more to be trusted than the first ice on a lake.” An Alice Munro story is “always a tactile experience,” but “beware the convenient cliché.” Andre Dubus is “one of the best American short story writers ever.” Beattie is also amazed by the novels of her friend David Markson, many of which are “spoken of as representing a leap forward for American literature.” In a lecture scrutinizing John Updike’s use of language, she writes, “I am in awe of what he can conjure up with a sentence or, at other times, a word.” Beattie also writes about her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry, whose art is “painted so as to keep the eye in motion.” He’s active as he paints, while Beattie is silent and stoic while at work “to better encourage or trick the character into coming out of hiding.” In “The Distillation of Lavender,” the author lovingly profiles the photographer Jayne Hinds Bidaut’s tintypes—“Reverent. Fragile,” like “lyrical poems.” Beattie’s charming portrait of Grant Wood’s Iowa and his American Gothic is spot-on. She ponders tone in a piece on Georgia Sheron’s “extraordinary” photographs and is mesmerized by Trisha Orr’s unique paintings of antique pitchers and jars “spilling forth intricate flowers spun together as if contained within a painterly spiderweb.” Joel Meyerowitz’s “glorious” photographs of Cape Cod “open us to the exhilaration of feeling something that we thought we knew, only to have it reappear as something infinitely more complex and more beautiful.”
Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-56792-752-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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