Canton’s enthusiasm is admirable, but his roots tend to tangle.
A daily journal in the company of an oak tree.
Canton, who teaches a masters course in “wild writing” at the University of Essex, is keen to locate the connections among literature, landscape, and the environment. But unlike his countryman Robert Macfarlane, Canton takes a more ethereal approach. In his latest book, he explores the strange sense of attachment he has to an 800-year-old tree known as the Honywood Oak on the Marks Hall Estate in northern Essex, in whose embrace he finds calm and contentment. The author reveres oaks above all, showcasing an appealing but excessively Romantic appreciation for these stately trees and ascribing to them significant powers and cognitive abilities. He gazes at old stumps and mourns felled oaks as if they were divine eminences, lending them a spiritual aura. Canton is highly observant, especially of bird species, and his descriptions are often lovely, but they also sometimes take on a purple hue. Within the umbra of the tree, inside the drip line, he is all giddy fascination, bewitched. While his enchantment is initially contagious, it becomes tiresome. Canton deals with the same tree for 120 consecutive pages, ruminating in a repetitive monologue before finally turning his gaze to another tree. The author is more engaging when he comes down from the canopy to relate the history of humanity’s relationship with oaks in shipbuilding and construction as well as literature and myth. When he confines himself to history and custom, the text is absorbing, with echoes of Walden. “Was there a time in some ancient prehistoric world when the creatures did not flee before us?” he asks. “Was there a time when humans did not strike fear and alarm into the natural world around them?” Canton is highly literate though rather at pains to show it. Eventually, even he begins to question his insistence on anthropomorphizing, which he does too often.
Canton’s enthusiasm is admirable, but his roots tend to tangle.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-303794-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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