An artist’s ardent plea for change.
Grave warnings for humankind.
Booker Prize winner Okri gathers poems, essays, and tales into a collection that conveys an urgent message about humans’ “suicidal relationship with the earth.” Each piece reflects the author’s frustration over our failure to act in the face of “ample evidence” that we have brought our environment to the brink of disaster. “We are proliferating disease and illness,” he writes. “I think it is nature’s revenge for strangling her, for tampering with her, and for being divorced from her. We are isolated and rootless in our lack of belief in anything.” In one piece, travelers from the distant future explore the “rich evidence of life” on our long-deserted planet. Earth, they decide, was “the most beautiful of the planets that we saw in our journeys across the galaxies,” but, sadly, they discern that it had been inhabited by “a rather parochial and tribal species, bedevilled by ideas of race and gender.” Another piece reveals politicians’ arrogant denials of climate change, while others offer dystopian visions of humanity’s last days. One long narrative follows a man and woman as they struggle to reinvent the world that greed has destroyed. “We say that there is a climate emergency,” writes Okri. “But it is truer to say that there is a humanity emergency.” He beseeches Earth itself to “teach us with your silent wisdom how to live again, how to be simple again, and how to rise to the greatness and sense of universal justice that is our divine inheritance.” Artists, especially, should dedicate themselves “to nothing short of redreaming society.” To that end, he advocates what he calls “existential creativity”: “it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species.” He urges “ferocity / To protect our humanity,” adding: “Can’t you hear the / Future weeping?”
An artist’s ardent plea for change.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781635423365
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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