A unique amble through seven decades of film history.
Reminiscences of a legendary film director.
Even fans of Ivory’s work would have to admit his films differ radically in quality, from the unpolished early features to some of the greatest ever made, including A Room With a View and Howards End. The same unevenness is evident in this leisurely memoir. Born to a sawmill owner in 1928, Ivory grew up privileged—his mother and their chauffeur picked him up from Army basic training “in the family limousine”—before attending USC film school. There, he made his first film, a documentary that would “tell the story of Venice through art.” Ivory eventually met writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant to form a creative team that endured for decades. The book’s first third is devoted to Ivory’s childhood in Klamath Falls, Oregon. A not insignificant portion of the volume describes his many sexual liaisons with men, both before and during his open 44-year relationship with Merchant. He frequently describes the genitals of the men he’s slept with or seen naked, often featuring odd word choices. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin, with whom he had an affair, had “an uncut, rosy, schoolboy-looking” penis that was “all ready for Maypole dancing.” A classmate’s was “cherubic.” Further references abound. The highlights of the book, most of which is told in a stream-of-consciousness style readers will find either sloppy or charmingly unfocused, are stories about his filmmaking process, the grand houses he has visited or shot films in, and the luminaries he’s worked with, including Vanessa Redgrave; Raquel Welch, who would “fight with everyone about everything” while filming The Wild Party; and Luca Guadagnino, with whom he was to co-direct Call Me By Your Name—a role from which he was dropped without explanation—and whose production company “would not pay my hotel bill” after the first day of shooting.
A unique amble through seven decades of film history.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-60159-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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