paper 0-8165-1902-1 The strange world of Baja California, caught in a dozen lapidary sidelong vignettes, from Berger (The Telling Distance, 1990). Writing with the grace of nightfall, Berger knits a handful of chance encounters together with cultural and natural history to produce a crystalline, idiosyncratic portrait of Baja, in particular the southern half. These vivid fragments, culled from numerous journeys to the place since the late 1960s, conjure a singular land that reinvents itself —like a familiar piece of music that modulates into increasingly remote keys.” At first, his forays south are leisurely, seamless expeditions in which he takes the geological measure of the peninsula——the gulf side rugged, volcanic, burning with color; the Pacific side flat, fogbound and cool——and meets up with an Old Baja hand who shows him some of the ropes. Subsequent journeys chronicle the author’s growing protectiveness of Baja. He is concerned with the protection of the Sonoran pronghorn, the breeding whale populations, the centuries-old ironwood trees harvested for fuel. While these environmental passages are powerful, Berger seems more comfortable with smaller memorable events, little touches of comic detail and spicings of the irrational that make his adventures real and enviable. There are impromptu feasts and fleeting glimpses of rare wildlife, visits to ancient cave paintings, the careless appeal of life in La Paz and the timelessness of San Ignacio. He witnesses a near-maximum eclipse (“like intravenous poetry,” observes his friend) and becomes a bit of a musical celebrity at the piano. For Berger is no tourist, and he has moved beyond the scope of the traveler; he lives his place and counts a goodly number of close friends in Baja. Since in the literature there was “no agreed-upon peninsula, I would assemble my own from available parts,” writes Berger at the beginning of the book. Just so, and stunningly.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8165-1901-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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