A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.
A novelist revisits the country of her upbringing to learn her family’s story.
When she was 23 and living in Chicago, Colombia native Rojas Contreras endured a bout of amnesia, “just a few weeks of oblivion,” when she “crashed my bicycle into an opening car door.” For eight weeks, “I had no idea where I came from or where I was going, what city I was in, what my name was, and I did not even know the year.” As horrifying as that episode was, she was luckier than her mother: At age 8, Mami fell down a well in Ocaña, Colombia, after she felt “a hand on the small of her back, giving her a gentle push.” When she recovered eight months later, Mami had “the ability to see ghosts and hear disembodied voices,” a gift her curandero (Latinx healer) father, Nono, had also possessed. In this poetic memoir, Rojas Contreras writes of the return trip she and her mother took to Colombia in 2012 to disinter Nono’s bones and tell his story. As the author writes, he was a man who knew “instructions for talking to the dead, telling the future, healing the ill, and moving the clouds”—the “secrets” Mami had inherited. Though the author too often relies on platitudes—e.g., “No one is above suffering”; “Hunger shapes us into a wisdom we cannot yet know”—the book derives considerable power from both her reminiscences of growing up in a nation where guerrilla groups and paramilitaries left bombs throughout Bogotá and its portrait of a loving family filled with colorful characters. Strongest of all are sections in which Rojas Contreras plays on the theme of amnesia to note that it pertains as much to willful maltreatment on the part of a country’s oppressors—she writes of the “highly destructive and orchestrated oppression” of Black and Indigenous peoples—as to individuals saddled with a medical affliction, calamities endured through no fault of the victims.
A moving depiction of family and the power of healing.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54666-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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