A smart, energetic, and wide-ranging series of ideas for more climate-responsive building.
An architect considers the challenges of and solutions to climate change.
In her nonfiction debut, Sutaria relates her own experiences growing up in the boiling-hot summers of Ahmedabad, India, before moving to America in 1976 to study at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. After her studies, she worked at a number of private design firms, then for Austin’s Public Works and Transportation Department, collaborating with politicians and industry leaders in her capacity as a member of both the United States Green Buildings Council and the American Institute of Architects. In these pages, illustrated with photos, charts, and blueprints, the author draws on all of this experience to explore the ways in which rising temperatures and worsening climate conditions present challenges that thermal-conscious building designs might help to meet. Sutaria refers to her approach as “vernacular architecture,” a climate-friendly process to create spaces that respond to environmental needs and enrich the lives of those who dwell within. “The deepest roots of any culture,” she writes, “are as immersed in the environment they develop as they are in the attitudes toward that environment.” Using many examples drawn from both Indian and American building environments, the author underscores the practical benefits of her project (as greenhouse gas emissions decrease, savings in public health increase). Sutaria writes with the forceful compassion of a true believer, bluntly telling her readers that we can’t just air-condition our way out of the climate crisis—we must adapt, not only with green initiatives but also with architecture that’s less wasteful. Some elements of her book may prove almost physically painful to readers in a 21st-century America whose government has recently begun abandoning any notion of environmental stewardship in favor of “drill, baby, drill” policies, but the text’s can-do optimism will counteract a good deal of this gloom, and Sutaria is knowledgeable enough to make it all very convincing.
A smart, energetic, and wide-ranging series of ideas for more climate-responsive building.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798891325791
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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