Charming, informative, touching, and full of riveting photographs.
Wildlife photographers Emery and Lei tell the true story of a Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from New York City’s Central Park Zoo and became a local celebrity.
Flaco hatched in a South Carolina bird park in March 2010. Two months later, when he was barely a fledgling, he was transferred to the Central Park Zoo, where he would spend almost 13 years. On the night of February 2, 2023, Flaco’s enclosure was vandalized by an unknown perpetrator who cut open the protective wire mesh, allowing Flaco to leave the zoo behind. Although he’d never had a chance to hone his flying skills in his small housing (he had a six-foot wingspan), he made his way to a sidewalk at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue. Pedestrians gathered to look at him, and police were called in case the bird was injured. Officers placed a pet carrier near him, but Flaco flew off to a tree by the nearby Plaza Hotel and evaded rescue. New Yorkers largely broke into two camps: those who felt that Flaco should be captured to ensure his safety, and those who believed that he should roam free: “Some saw him as an underdog, others, as an immigrant, still others saw an outlaw. More than a few, I imagine, saw him as all those things rolled into one.” Meanwhile, the bird strengthened his flying skills and learned to hunt New York’s abundant rat population. He also won the hearts of birders, wildlife photographers, and many others. Emery and Lei document Flaco’s remarkable adventures in text and in many magnificent photos, taken by the authors and other enthusiastic followers. It’s packed with details about the physiology and habits of owls, as well as delightful vignettes of Flaco’s antics (including fun images of him peering into apartment windows). This ode to Flaco is also effectively a tribute to the community he brought together—a diverse collection of city folk who shared real-time sightings and formed new friendships. Despite Flaco’s eventual sad demise, this is an inspirational tale of a valiant, curious escapee.
Charming, informative, touching, and full of riveting photographs.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798991510509
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Owls of New York
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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