An eloquent and perceptive memoir in essays.
An essayist examines the meaning of her identity as a woman born, raised, and rooted in the mythologized lands of the American West.
Maile, a writing professor at Boise State University, left rural Idaho as a young woman to attend college in Boston and experience the urban life of her dreams. Instead, she writes, “the West found me in the East.” Inspired by a book about Montana ranch life, she returned home six months later. In this collection of essays, the latest in the publisher’s American Lives series, the author examines her lifelong connection to the West while probing the nature of Western identity. Many view the West as a land of romantic “escape,” but for the author, it is also a place where mythology and modernity collide, often with negative consequences. In “Anytown, USA,” Maile muses on how her hometown developed into a mecca for out-of-state developers and lost its identity. In the ensuing “land battles,” a distinctive rural culture was replaced by “the faceless homogeneity of suburbia.” A lifelong Westerner, Maile admits to living—and propagating—Western clichés: pickup truck, cowboy boots, etc. While she does not align with current conservative Idaho politics, she still professes an abiding affection for “dirty bars, pastel prairies, cracked boots, whiny singers…[and] rodeo queens.” Country music speaks to that love in the way it helps her “gain entry to an inaccessible world [the Western past].” Yet much as she would like to believe in Western stereotypes—e.g., the “tough-as-nails” pioneer woman portrayed in True Grit—Maile also knows that her vision of the West relies on a romanticism that overlooks how “depression, laudanum addiction [and] psychosis” were the lot of most female pioneers. Blending personal insight with sharp-eyed cultural analysis, the author celebrates the West and Western identity without ever losing sight of the myriad complexities that underlie both.
An eloquent and perceptive memoir in essays.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4962-2021-9
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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