A sincere, ardent, and uncomplicated plea for fellowship with one another and the planet.
A nonfiction book calls for people to renew a healthy relationship with the natural world.
“Humanity faces a crossroads,” Overeynder writes. “It is urgently necessary that we understand how to use the powers given to us on behalf of life.” The crossroads in question throughout most of the book is the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and the many ways it disrupted the normal rhythms of life. Indeed, many sections of the work read as though they were unrevised from four years ago, when pandemic lockdowns were keeping everybody indoors. “Who will we be when we resurrect again on the other side of Covid-19,” she asks, hoping people will emerge kinder and gentler (an ironic time capsule, considering the worldwide rise of fascist governments in the last few years). In response to this and other tensions, the author draws on a variety of spiritual and religious traditions in order to champion the concept of Earth as a conscious, feeling, living being. “Just as everything has intelligence and everything and every being has a purpose to fulfill,” she asserts, “Earth as a whole organism has its reason for being.” Through writing about extensive hikes taken with her partner in the landscapes around Austin, Texas, and the accompanying brief meditations these inspire, she hopes to give her readers a renewed sense of the healing power of nature. She writes all this with a simple, heartfelt passion, and her pan-spiritualist approach very pleasingly excludes no faith traditions. Above all, her optimism infuses the book: “As we activate the sacred trust of living in reciprocity with Earth, we will see that we are making a shared future possible.” In light of the fact that the man just elected president of the United States has promised there will be oil drilling in national parks, some readers may find this vision of reciprocity unrealistic. But this doesn’t stop Overeynder from pushing it with real fervor.
A sincere, ardent, and uncomplicated plea for fellowship with one another and the planet.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798218540111
Page Count: 227
Publisher: One Sacred Earth Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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