A ferocious defense of a generation of women against the forces that made them.
Critical reflection from deep in the trenches of pop culture.
The touch points for Bolin’s essay collection are not the usual suspects of recent pop culture analysis—neither billboard stars nor social media tropes of the 2020s are under the microscope here. Instead, she looks slightly backward, to the steady diet of MTV video countdowns, reality television, glossy magazines, and meandering trips to the mall, that shaped—and still hold a strong, nostalgic grip on—millennial women. In a style shared by many of her contemporaries, Bolin self-consciously burrows into and through her own restlessness, disappointment, and wary curiosity to form a reflective analysis of topics from fitness trackers to Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. For those not fluent in her cultural material, the author’s personal investment bolsters the sincerity of her inquiry and the applicability of her hypothesis. The predicament into which corporate executives have pushed us, Bolin suggests, is as problematic as a cult, and our wistful loyalty to the individuals and narratives they have sold draws women into their own oppression. Bolin is determined to exhume what makes these cultural influences both so compelling and so problematic, and her exhaustive probing sometimes becomes fumbling or overdrawn. But, repeatedly, she stops just short of full-blown rant to press quote-worthy, crystalline passages of chilling clarity into the reader’s palm about how the ambitions of patriarchy and capitalism dovetail and how their impact has watered down the promises of feminism for a generation. (Essays on the NXIVM cult and on the teen magazine industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s are particularly, disturbingly excellent.) If power comes from clear-eyed, uncompromising knowledge, Bolin’s text is a tool for the takedown of more current trends of consumerism, oppression, and the new technology that fuels them.
A ferocious defense of a generation of women against the forces that made them.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780063440524
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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 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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