A cheerfully personal, if occasionally obscure, perspective on the complexities of Earth and beyond.
Marin offers a loosely autobiographical meditation on space, time, and other subjects.
The author explains that she does not particularly care for the Gregorian calendar; her main critique is that it has “very little to do with what the moon is up to.” In this work, Marin details a more moon-centered (or “luni-solar”) calendar. In this version, there are nine days in a week, mostly with names linked to planets (Vensday, for example). In the pages that follow, the author develops her calendar and presents a smorgasbord of other material concerning seasons, traditions, and the solar system. There are also personal reflections, such as notes on a trip the author took to Glastonbury in the early 2000s. Marin shares various dreams she’s had, including one that she has thought about for 30-some years, in which a being with red hair took her into another world. Both astronomy and astrology are given great attention: The author discusses how Saturn’s rings are divided into seven sections, and the reader learns about concepts like “Saturn Return,” which occurs when “Saturn occupies the same sign it did at a person’s birth.” This wide breadth of material sets the book apart from, well, most books—the reader is taken on a seasonally inspired journey that offers recipes, poems, and more. The free-wheeling nature of the text is buoyed by the author’s upbeat attitude, such as when the reader is encouraged at the beginning of one recipe to “Have fun!” Yet some points prove to be perplexing—Marin’s account of her trip to Glastonbury can be confusing. A number of topics, such as quotations from Robert Coon and mentions of a hostel called Black Sheep, are thrown at the reader in rapid succession; these passages may require re-reading to fully grasp what the author is conveying. Yet taken altogether, the many small pieces of the work add up to a unique and engaging whole.
A cheerfully personal, if occasionally obscure, perspective on the complexities of Earth and beyond.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798987775400
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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