Scholarship and memoir meld in a stimulating collection.
A Black feminist perspective on the arts, politics, and race.
Griffin, a 2021 Guggenheim fellow and professor of African American literature at Columbia, gathers essays, written over the past 30 years, that cohere to reveal her evolution as an insightful cultural critic and historian. The book’s title alludes to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, published in 1983, which Griffin read as a college student and which, she writes, “helped me to identify my intellectual calling” and inspired her appreciation of the essay as a literary form. Also deeply influential was Toni Morrison, whose works shaped her understanding “of history, narrative, power, domination, and language.” From Morrison’s work, Griffin came to understand that “mobility and migration were the dominant tropes of Black life in the modern world.” Among many essays on music, Griffin considers Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and three performers of the 1970s—Minnie Riperton, Syreeta Wright, and Deniece Williams—whose “ethereal, introspective, angelic voices” pointed to “a sense of healing and possibility.” Griffin also examines the cultural significance of Black women singers, such as Marian Anderson and Aretha Franklin, who have performed before audiences on momentous occasions—presidential inaugurations, the aftermath of disasters—“when the nation is trying to present an image of itself to itself and to the world.” Beyoncé falls into that category, singing the Etta James classic “At Last” at a ball celebrating the election of Barack Obama. That performance, and the election itself, inspires Griffin’s perceptive analysis of the relationship of Michelle Obama and Beyoncé to America’s racial history. Other essays include reflections on teaching online during the pandemic; the consequences of book banning; Hurricane Katrina, which exacerbated the “instability, insecurity, and disruption” that have blighted Black history; and the way difference has been “inscribed on the bodies of Black women.”
Scholarship and memoir meld in a stimulating collection.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780393355772
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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