A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.
A plangent diatribe against war.
In his latest, Hedges argues that “preemptive war is a war crime,” including in the Ukraine, but the West made Russia do it by extending NATO into Eastern Europe, so that “Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry.” And because Russian was the primary language of most Crimeans, why should Russia not have annexed the peninsula? The author’s condition-tinged discussion—which simultaneously damns and excuses the war in Ukraine—soon grows tiresome, especially because Hedges does not extend the same “yes, but” privilege to, say, Germany in its invasion of German-speaking Sudetenland or the U.S. in its invasion of Iraq. While excoriating the Biden administration for being stocked with presumed nationalists such as Anthony Blinken and Kimberly Kagan (the latter’s crime being, apparently, that she founded a think tank that studies war), Hedges writes, “When an enemy can’t be found, an enemy is manufactured. Putin has become…the new Hitler, out to grab Ukraine and the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.” Is Putin an invented foe? That seems a dividing-line question: If you answer in the affirmative, you’ll likely keep reading, and if not, not. A noted leftist critic, Hedges was a contributor to the now-shuttered Russian TV channel RT America, which may explain the rationalizations, against which his concluding prayer that we see “an end to war before we stumble into a nuclear holocaust that devours us all” seems halfhearted—particularly when it’s preceded by a call for a moratorium on arms shipments to Ukraine. Elsewhere, Hedges rehearses the usual charges, few surprising: War is bad because civilians get hurt, soldiers are scarred (“The worst trauma is often caused not by what combat veterans witnessed but by what they did”), corporations become rich, and so on.
A book of predictable hectoring—a far cry from the author’s best work.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64421-293-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
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
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