A well-curated assemblage of Black voices that draws profound connections among family, nature, aspiration, and loss.
A unique collection of nature writing focused on Black experience and memory.
This book is a response to the absence of Black literature about attachment to the American landscape, a multigenerational dwelling place that is both internal and external. An abundance of relevant themes emerge: home as refuge, seeking freedom amid social oppression, gardens as healers, and the complex history of Black landownership. Opening with an irony that casts its shadow on the pages that follow, Sharkey describes a youthful photo of her mother “kneeling by a pond on a twelve-acre property in New York that she and my father will never own, but that will become their legacy.” Attachment does not equal possession, and Sharkey’s own quest for “home” becomes all-consuming, extending to the realm of nature writing that “has been dominated by white, cisgender men with access to resources,” from Thoreau to Audubon, Abbey to Pollan. These essays hit from refreshingly different angles. Birder Sean Hill juxtaposes his life to that of Austin Dabney, a Revolutionary War soldier rewarded with land grants and freedom (at least from slavery). Alexis Pauline Gumbs connects her life to that of “Black feminist speculative nature poet” Audre Lorde. The more academic essays are the fruit of archival research, though Sharkey reminds us to be attuned to “the racist structures in place in the institutions of memory.” Lauret Savoy provides ample illustrations of American place names that are “not innocent, passive, or neutral.” Similar in approach and spirit to Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, these selections are written in response to artifacts, with the exception of Ronald L. Greer’s “Magic Alley,” which lyrically depicts the beauty and horrors of a Detroit neighborhood through the eyes of a child, a place where “the people who used the powdery substance alchemically transformed it to a liquid, then used a needle to escape to another dimension.”
A well-curated assemblage of Black voices that draws profound connections among family, nature, aspiration, and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781571313904
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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