A very tall tale about a very big bird.
Verhines, a veteran truck driver, relates his encounter with a gigantic, mysterious bird.
In July 2018, the author was driving his rig in Pennsylvania near sunset when he saw the enormous bird. In his initial reaction, recorded for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, he stated that it was a larger-than-average bird. He subsequently revised this estimate upward after both watching an episode of MonsterQuest, a TV show, about giant birds and receiving the exact measurements of “his” thunderbird from God in a prophetic vision. His new estimates are staggering: In this book, he claims the creature he saw in Pennsylvania was 50 feet long with a wingspan of 220 feet (twice as long as an adult blue whale), individual feathers as long as 20 feet, and a possible weight of 2,000 pounds, although he suggests it could be as high as 25,000 pounds (twice as heavy as an adult African elephant). “Its wings and body broke through the sky with such a force that I thought I saw it pushing the air,” he writes. “My guess is that it was dive-bombing me at about 150 miles an hour.” Verhines moves from the account of his own sighting to an overview of other “thunderbird” sightings and to a summary of the whole concept of “cryptozoology,” the practice of theorizing about large, undiscovered animals. But he likewise admits that his primary fact-verification process is religious. “When I want to rivet something down in truth,” he writes, “I use Bible verses or Bible ideas to ground my approach.” He writes about large birds like condors and extinct avian dinosaurs like pterosaurs, but since there is no possibility that an animal the size he describes (much less a breeding population of them) could exist, his digressions on history and speculative biology, however entertainingly written, will likely be dismissed by all but the most zealous cryptozoologists.
A very tall tale about a very big bird.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-97-722436-1
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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