A moving portrait of a life lived on the further reaches of the bizarre planet of American celebrity.
Sharing a mother’s life and essence in an openhearted, unmediated way.
The title of this book is a lyric from “Where No One Stands Alone,” one of the songs Lisa Marie Presley recorded as a duet with archival tapes of her father, Elvis Presley. Now her daughter, Riley Keough, has done something similar, using material that her mother recorded in the last years of her life, before her death at 54 in 2023. Transcribing and editing the tapes, Keough adds commentary and fills in the blanks, noting in a preface that her mother “was constitutionally incapable of hiding anything from me.” The two voices are printed in different fonts in the book, which works well. Lisa Marie shares powerful memories of her father, who died when she was nine, from wild times in golf carts at Graceland to the day his lifeless body was carried away. Her teenage years were shaped by the hands-off approach of her mother, Priscilla Presley, who dropped her at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre to be taken care of. She shares interesting details of her relationships with husbands Danny Keough, Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage, and Michael Lockwood. The story of her and Jackson falling in love, bonding over the wildly abnormal lives they share, reveals a side to the man rarely seen. The toll taken by the suicide of Keough’s younger brother Ben in 2020 is expressed by both authors; from then on, Lisa Marie’s own death was something of a foregone conclusion. If his mother felt that, both by nature and by nurture, “Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance,” then she was equally cursed: “I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell.”
A moving portrait of a life lived on the further reaches of the bizarre planet of American celebrity.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780593733875
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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