A charming, heartfelt homage to the makers, past and present, who have defined lives and communities across the world.
Essays in celebration of artisans.
At first glance, the worlds of fashion and fishing may appear to be disparate topics, but using poetic language, childhood experiences, and knowledge of cultural history, Deming captivatingly weaves together these communities. Inspired by a 2016 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring Yves Saint Laurent’s “sardine dress,” the author set out to learn more about the artisans who have made an impact on her life. Among them are her maternal ancestors, who ran a couture dressmaking business “in Manhattan from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression,” and the herring fishermen on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada, where she spent her childhood summers. Deming laments “the world’s dismissal of makers in favor of manufacturers,” which has “driven such small-scale artistry into obsolescence.” In a fascinating journey, she takes us around the world, from New Brunswick to New York to Paris and beyond, chasing leads and sifting through archives and sharing her family’s history and her own quest for continuity and belonging. Deming lovingly describes her grandmother’s skills cutting fabric and sewing together an elegant dress without a pattern as well as her remarkable ability to give new life to the author’s boring, secondhand prom dress. She also expresses the same childhood admiration and excitement in her descriptions of watching the fishermen on the island pull their bounties from the sea. “How much human life depended on the sea and the people’s ability to make vessels and nets and ropes and sails and salt, and to read water and sky and stars. Their ability to survive unimaginable hardship.” A running theme is the detachment between mother and daughter that has plagued Deming’s family for at least two generations, ultimately leading to her grandmother’s being buried in an unmarked grave and listed as having no heirs. At times, the details repeat across the essays, but this takes little away from the book’s overall high quality.
A charming, heartfelt homage to the makers, past and present, who have defined lives and communities across the world.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-482-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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