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 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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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