A beguiling ramble full of captivating DIY information and arresting visuals of flora and fauna.
Retallick explores her passions for bicycle touring, water management, gardening, birdwatching, and photography in this illustrated miscellany.
The author (who has had an eclectic career in publishing, commercial photography, bicycle repair and maintenance, and web design) here expounds on a number of interests and adventures, starting with her love affair with bike riding, which took her on long tours around the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River, and eventually through all 50 states during her 20s. She finally settled down in Tucson, where she landscaped her yard with cacti, mesquite trees, and other native desert plants; installed swales, mulched basins, and berms to absorb water and avoid flooding during occasional rainstorms; installed a 1,500-gallon cistern to collect rain running off her roof, and saved greywater from her laundry and dishwashing, using all of this stored water to irrigate her vegetable garden and fruit trees. (Retallick incorporates the food she grows into a number of offbeat dishes for which she provides recipes, including salsa dip and cookies made from mesquite flour.) From this catalogue of intriguing projects, the author emerges as an endlessly inquisitive Renaissance woman who is raptly attuned to the world. The book includes brief, engaging tutorials on everything from hydrology to photographic technique; Retallick also observes the rhythms of nature in droll, evocative prose. (“He was picking up twigs, dropping them, choosing different twigs, and, man, this is exhausting,” she writes of the male in a white-winged dove nesting pair. “I couldn’t help thinking that this guy married the birdie equivalent of Martha Stewart. Because he couldn’t fly up to the nest with just any twig. It had to be the perfect twig.”) Retallick’s color photos, mostly taken in her yard, are full of homely but vibrant images: delicate cilantro leaves glowing deep green beneath dew-drops; ripening pomegranates vomiting their lurid red innards through an opening; a curve-billed thrasher perched insolently on a rusty fence, lean and hungry, its arcing proboscis ready to dig.
A beguiling ramble full of captivating DIY information and arresting visuals of flora and fauna.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798986857701
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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