Memorable, melancholy, elegiac journeys.
Mapping the geography of longing.
“We are lost,” essayist Searcy writes in his luminous collection of meditations and explorations. “We’re neither here nor there. There’s you, and there’s the you that knows there’s you. And in that gap between the two—and we are always in that gap—we’re migratory.” The author’s migrations take him from his backyard telescope to the massive Lowell Observatory, from his childhood in Dallas, where he roamed the alleys around his house, to Arizona, where he traveled to Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s earthy, futuristic village. A few miles from the Meteor Crater—a “mere exhilaration,” in his estimation—he visited a makeshift museum set up by a former professor of biology, where, through an “empty, ruined window,” he saw a tiny bee floating, absolutely still: “It holds that space in place, the way some hovering insects do as if obedient to, in reference to, some universal center.” For Searcy, that magical stillness can emerge from old photographs, from his own subconscious, from air itself. “The air, the empty air, is full of meaning,” he writes. “Did you know that the dapples of sunlight under a tree are blurred and overlapping images of the sun? Not just the wash of light, like water, leaking through. But actual photographic images—a repetitious murmuring.” Telescopes, cameras, and the strange instrument known as the Claude glass become propitious devices for discovery. The Claude glass, a tinted, slightly convex mirror popular among late-18th and early-19th-century tourists, was designed “to have you turn away from what you wish to study. A device precisely for averted vision” that seemed to make nature’s sublimity “more acceptable, more picturesque.” Seeing slant, for Searcy as for Emily Dickinson, can be revelatory. In lyrical, tender prose, Searcy recalls cherished friends, family memories (a troubled daughter haunts some pieces), and capricious travels through place and time in search of wonder.
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Memorable, melancholy, elegiac journeys.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13364-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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