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TOP BILLIN'

STORIES OF LAUGHTER, LESSONS, AND TRIUMPH

Bellamy’s tale of success is inspirational but slightly sanitized.

The comedian and actor’s life story.

Bellamy’s narrative isn’t quite a fairy tale, but it could definitely be a Lifetime movie. For much of the book, the author engagingly details the early milestones of his life: growing up poor in New Jersey, ditching his computer science studies at Rutgers (“It was boring as hell and required having a solitary focus”), and finding himself on the fast track in a good-paying marketing job at a tobacco company before giving it up to pursue comedy. “Anytime I could bring a laugh or levity to a situation, I’d do it gladly,” he writes. “Making people feel good was my calling and I was damn good at it, if I do say so myself.” It’s a fair self-assessment but not quite the anything-goes material that made him a must-see music and acting personality in the 1990s. Bellamy offers a few behind-the-scenes revelations—e.g., when he hung up on Janet Jackson because he thought it was a prank call, or how Michael Jackson’s handlers rejected most of his questions for an interview. Many readers may feel that Bellamy is holding something back, especially when discussing his love life. “A real man will never kiss and tell, but I will confirm that my life certainly played out like a movie,” he writes. “As you’re ascending into the stratosphere of fame, women are like stars in a clear night sky because they suddenly appear everywhere.” The reason for the caginess comes toward the end, as he discusses slowing down his career to stay home with his kids. “I want to produce content that reflects the positive side of the Black experience,” he writes of his eponymous production company. It’s an admirable quest to maintain your values as a role model, which Bellamy certainly does, especially when discussing racial issues, but it cramps his style as a storyteller.

Bellamy’s tale of success is inspirational but slightly sanitized.

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9780063237629

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023

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CONVERSATIONS WITH BIRDS

An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.

A delightful ode to birds and a powerful defense of the planet we share with them.

In this moving memoir, filmmaker and novelist Kumar explores encounters with birds as meditations on the natural world. Told in a series of vignettes comprised of notable bird sightings, the narrative offers countless magnificent reminders of the beauty and force of nature as well as warnings of human-caused destruction as bird populations plummet due to such factors as habitat loss, water shortages, and changing temperatures. Kumar didn’t take up birding until her 20s, when a chance encounter on the beach with some avid birders and a flock of curlews transformed her life. This experience became her access point to nature, and she nurtured that connection, whether living in urban settings like Los Angeles or, later, rural New Mexico, where “even the winters are sun-drenched.” Through birds, the author was able to revisit the childhood intimacy with her surroundings that she cherished growing up in the heavily forested mountains of northeastern India. “Birds became a portal to a more vivid, enchanted world,” she writes, and “allowed me once again to relish solitude in the way I had as a child.” This sense of enchantment permeates the book as she brings us along on her adventures, including long odysseys to see bald eagles, bobcat sightings through her living room window, and glimpses of the mango-colored tanager in a city park. The author is clearly concerned about leaving a planet rich with wildlife for her children, but her ancestors are also on her mind. She lost both her parents and brother as a young adult, and she connects to their spirits through birds and nature. Ultimately, this is a book about the interconnectedness of generations and ecosystems, and birds are the conduit between the two. “Sometimes it just takes the right bird to awaken us,” writes Kumar.

An eloquent depiction of how birding engenders a deep love of our ecosystems and a more profound understanding of ourselves.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-57131-399-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Milkweed

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022

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LIFE WITH PICASSO

It's high spirited reading.

When Françoise Gilot, an aspiring young painter, met Pablo Picasso in May, 1943, she was twenty-one years old, he some forty years her senior.

As they grew together, setting about their mutual campaigns upon each other, she proved herself a worthy adversary rather than acolyte. In the ten years which she shared with him, undertaking to assuage his solitude, bearing him two children, meeting his friend and admirers, she maintained a cool comprehension along with her compassion for Picasso the man that shows to delightful advantage here. For Françoise Gilot has the capacity to reveal the man in his intimate and professional dealings, and Picasso is superlative, inimitable copy. Witness Picasso dangling his agents, foremost among them Kahnweller, fancing with his friends Braque and Matisse, playing cat and mouse with the women in his life -- wife Olga, Marie Therese Walter, Dora Marr, Françoise and her successor Jacqueline Roque. But the author has the capacity as well to show Picasso the artist: she quotes him on painting, describes his method of work in painting, sculpture, pottery. Picasso himself is so articulate that he defies other description; au fond, art and the artist are subversive. His re-marks on art include not only his own but that of his foremost colleagues, Matisse and Braque, Miro, Legor, Chagall...All his encounters here are formed by his own formidable temperament, and recalled in satisfying detail by the woman who shared them. An intimate, vivid, above all intelligent and authentic portrait of Picasso, with its twin elements of love and art, this should sell like mad. And rightly.

 It's high spirited reading.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 9781681373195

Page Count: 384

Publisher: NYRB Classics

Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

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