by Ellen Meloy ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1999
A thoughtful recounting of one woman’s travels in the post—Cold War American West. Meloy (Raven’s Exile, not reviewed), an award-winning writer and river-runner who lives in southeastern Utah, writes that she awoke one morning to discover that she was “either helplessly unmoored from my Self or hopelessly lost in the murk of Self”—a sticky tangle either way. To reattach herself to herself and also to her chosen turf, this “duck-and-covergirl born in the nuclear West” decided to revisit the land of her youth, where the Kennedy-era promise of atomic energy too cheap to meter and of mutual assured destruction kept the nation teetering between existential gloom and technology-born optimism. Meloy’s wanderings take her to the back roads of the desert Southwest, to hidden canyons where Navajo witchcraft and toxic waste reign side by side, and to little towns where uranium miners wait for cancer to claim them; collectively, the author calls these places “the terrain of strategic death.” Her travels ultimately guide her to the birthplace of the nuclear age: Los Alamos, N.M., where Meloy gives us a tour of the famed laboratory where the A-bomb was invented—but also of the surrounding countryside, where dealers in nuclear curios ply their trade “against [a] Wile E. Coyote backdrop.” Much has changed in the West since nuclear peace broke out a decade ago; as Meloy writes, “Ground zero in the nineties has at first an oddly pastoral luminosity—pastoral, that is, to desert denizens like me, who are accustomed to harmonious ‘emptiness’ and therefore find nothing missing” in the empty landscape. But in the end, as she shows us, the desert remains the desert, timelessly indifferent to human foibles. Meloy has not only rediscovered her connection to the badlands’she’s also made a fine book in the bargain. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-4065-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ellen Meloy
BOOK REVIEW
by Ellen Meloy
BOOK REVIEW
by Ellen Meloy
by Brian Fies illustrated by Brian Fies ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2019
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
by Helen Macdonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2015
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
finalist
New York Times Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Finalist
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.