A soulful and visually stunning exploration of faith in poetic form.
A wise, winged creature shares a series of spiritual meditations.
In this illustrated debut collection of rhyming vignettes, a mystical bird, Red-Tail Hawk, visits people from all walks of life to encourage them, reassure them, and remind them of God’s grace, love, and forgiveness. A messenger of the basic tenets of faith, the hawk plants seeds of peace in people’s minds, gently nudges them back to the present, and promotes prayer: “Red-Tail Hawk soars the skies, / Sharing the secret that your spirit flies. / ‘Trust your inner source,’ is his call. / ‘It will pick you up when you trip and fall.’ ” The hawk showers readers with insights on a wide variety of subjects, from a mystical shaman disturbed by a violent society to a single mother worried about her children’s welfare and an old man who regrets that he lived a life of “greed and desire.” The hawk teaches that beauty is temporary; an attitude of gratitude is the key to contentment; and one should seek God rather than material things or professional measures of success. All experiences are a lesson, the hawk advises, and readers should learn from them rather than wallow. The final edict of the hawk is: “The future is illusion; the past is just dreams. Stay here in the present. Life is better than it seems.” While Tawadi’s simple vignettes are moving, the real magic of this book lies in the images by debut illustrators Lucine and Redbone. The full-page pictures capture both people and landscapes in bold blues, golden yellows, rusty reds, verdant greens, and inky blacks with tactile details. On the surface, this volume appears to be appropriate for children, especially given its colorful visual form and straightforward storytelling. But its themes of suffering and death (even suicide, in the case of a hopeless veteran whom the hawk discourages from ending his own life) might be too morbid for young audiences. The work’s teachings are also somewhat elementary for adults who have been exposed to a religious or spiritual education.
A soulful and visually stunning exploration of faith in poetic form.Pub Date: May 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8002-7
Page Count: 35
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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