A profound lesson in how to hear the world anew.
On the intimate art of listening well.
We raise girls to be good listeners in a world of men. As a music journalist, Vincent had made a career out of listening. She listened in clubs, at concerts, and to mostly male artists in her interviews. Music was omnipresent, essential to her life as a teen and young adult. Now in her 30s, she found herself surrounded by silence. “If I tried to unpick how I’d grown from a girl who thrived among the dissonance of a punk record into a woman who preferred to be in silence, I got caught in tangles,” she writes. Then, into that silence came her baby’s heartbeat from a monitor. Later, she heard his cry. In this moving and brilliant book, Vincent examines not just sound but what it means to listen. She explores the quiet sounds of domesticity, motherhood, and the quotidian—often overlooked, feminine sounds. She reflects on what she hears at Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, in the near-mythic sound of the aurora borealis—which has been described as sheets of paper rubbing together—from national security translators, and in the practice of Deep Listening. “I want to make the quiet loud,” she declares, and that is exactly what she does. Her quiet is populated by many brilliant women, including researchers and scientists of sound, while her own journey of motherhood makes vivid the ways in which a mother’s biology is rewired to respond to their child’s sound. Speaking with a deaf artist, Vincent challenges her preconceptions that “being without sound was to suffer,” instead learning “a different way of listening,” one rich in community and creativity. Though the book takes place in many quiet spaces, the reverberations are loud, and the author’s descriptions evocative. From excellent research on those elements of noise that are often overlooked yet build the fabric of our daily lives, Vincent weaves a tapestry of sound and understanding.
A profound lesson in how to hear the world anew.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781837260775
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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
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
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