Clarity and complication mark this wide-ranging collection.
Essayists seek an ecological path forward.
Editors Minteer, author of A Wilder Kingdom, and Losos, author of How Evolution Shapes Our Lives, open with a consideration of 19th-century landscape painter Thomas Cole, the allegorical content of his work, and his warning to America about abandoning its wilderness roots. Yet they caution that Cole’s profoundly influential message rested, in part, on what today seem like problematic assumptions, chiefly his idealized, mythic sense of what constitutes “wilderness” and the American exceptionalism it implies. What is truly “wild” in the sense that the early European settlers in the Americas understood it, ignorant of the land’s actual cultural and biological history? Much of what we think of as wilderness areas are actually nothing of the sort; they were husbanded by Indigenous peoples for centuries. The scientists, humanists, and nature writers whose essays grace this book present subtle, though sometimes striking, differences in defining the term wild. Their thought-provoking essays not only convey the complexities involved—the tensions among preservation, rewilding, and human access—but often surprise with their unconventional attitudes and perspectives. Yet each essayist seems to share a conviction that having a scientific grasp of the perils facing our planet is incomplete without forging a moral and emotional bond with it. The theme of discovering, protecting, and actually experiencing nature is the linchpin of the book, together with a call to modify or discard outmoded ideas for a more effective approach. Rarely is the tone sententious or the writing ponderously academic. There are too many varied and nuanced voices to neatly summarize, yet there’s the dispiriting feeling that these writers may be preaching to the choir. Contributors include Hal Herzog, Martha L. Crump, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Gary Paul Nabhan.
Clarity and complication mark this wide-ranging collection.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780691228624
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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