A vivid (and improbable) account of aliens among us.
A woman recalls her encounters with extraterrestrials—and the ramifications for life on Earth—in this debut memoir.
In her wide-ranging book, Star jumps right into the meat of the matter: In the 1980s, she was contacted by the “Ultraterrestrials” who form the High Spiritual Council and the Galactic Star Federation, congregations of superadvanced aliens. They asked her to become an ambassador to the “Star Kin,” who had separated from their Earth Kin more than 10,000 years ago. The author recalls that she was requested to work with a select band of likewise mentally advanced humans in order to prevent disasters on Earth. The Galactic Earth Council was born in 2010, comprising the only people on the planet who know what Star calls “the Truth of Truths”: that humans are not alone in the universe and that the cosmos is in fact teeming with life. This group also recognizes that the Star Kin seek an “Awakening” so that they and their Earth Kin can be reunited. “We are one humanity, in relation to each other,” she writes, “each with a gift from the Creator to be respected by all present.” The work includes testimonials from other members of the galactic council as well as the author’s many recollections of dealing with the Star Kin here on Earth, including moments when the vast armada of the Federation’s spacecraft paused overhead in the sky, “allowing us to see the glory of their amazing ships in many different sizes and shapes.” Star’s evocative book is enthusiastically written and will appeal to fans of UFO literature. But other readers will hit the wall of credulity almost immediately since the author opens her memoir by describing how the Star Kin helped cap the leaking BP–operated Macondo Prospect during the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010. Every moment of the disaster, including its end, was completely documented and filmed and showed no alien involvement. Likewise, no alien armadas have recently entered Earth’s atmosphere and loitered in plain view. But such things will hardly be obstacles to devotees of this kind of vibrant galactic narrative.
A vivid (and improbable) account of aliens among us.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.
Whimsical illustrations meet quirky prose in this tag-team reinvention of the iconic 1933 book.
An award-winning New Yorker illustrator, designer, and author, Kalman (Swami on Rye: Max in India, 2018, etc.) takes on the challenge of illustrating Stein’s iconic “auto” biography of her longtime companion Toklas. Even though it’s not as ambitious as Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2006) or Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures (2011), Kalman’s 70-plus color illustrations, rendered in her distinctive playful and Fauve-esque style, perfectly reflect the artistic and intellectual world of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In a short afterword, written in Kalman’s distinctive script, she describes the book as a “love story” about how “two people, joined together, become themselves. They cannot breathe right without each other.” An accompanying illustration shows them sitting together at a table, Stein reading a book (aloud?), Toklas looking on (listening?). On the final page of the book, Stein notes that Toklas probably will not write her autobiography, so “I am going to write it for you….And she did and this is it.” On first meeting Stein, Toklas said there are a “great many things to tell of what was happening then….I must describe what I saw when I came.” With the current volume, we see what Kalman saw. Here’s Stein sitting in a bright yellow chair at her popular Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus, Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein on the wall behind her. Luminaries came and went, all beautifully captured with Kalman’s bright brush strokes: Toulouse-Lautrec; Seurat, who “caught his fatal cold”; the “extraordinarily brilliant” Guillaume Apollinaire; William James, Stein’s former teacher; Marcel Duchamp (“everybody loved him)”; Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky; James Joyce and Sylvia Beach; Hemingway; the “beautiful” Edith Sitwell; and of course, Toklas, wearing one of her hats with “lovely artificial flowers” on top.
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59420-460-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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