An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.
From the wilderness of Colorado, two writers share their anxieties and hopes.
In late March, Houston and Irvine began writing to each other from their homes on opposite sides of the San Juan Mountains. What started as a contribution to Orion magazine’s online pandemic series continued, resulting in a collection, gracefully illustrated by Taylor, that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times. Both women are “intensely aware” that they write from a place of privilege: “two healthy white women in respectful, loving relationships who have the enormous privilege of doing meaningful work from home, with plenty of food socked away and some of the most beautiful and accessible wildlands all around.” Yet despite their good fortune, they reveal past wounds and present challenges. For example, both had abusive fathers and mothers who said they regretted having them; both have scar tissue in their lungs from pneumonia and high altitudes, making them particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. Irvine has a daughter who suffers from epilepsy and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder. “What I know for sure,” she writes, “is that privilege doesn’t spare you from trauma, although it can lessen the blow, and the aftermath.” Motherhood, womanhood, work, and nature recur as themes, as does frustration with Donald Trump and with neighbors who vehemently refuse to wear masks. “I watch this administration attack and destroy every single thing that brings me joy,” Houston writes, “air and water, sure, trees and animals, every slice of wildness we have left, but also the arts, education, diversity itself, Amtrak, solar power, the post office.” They wonder if post-pandemic life will be different. “Battling for a better world is the only occupation now,” notes Houston, “and it is women’s turn to lead the charge, maybe with a few good men in tow.”
An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948814-38-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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 revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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