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THE TINY BEE THAT HOVERS AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

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

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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