Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds.
A meditation on freedom and confinement and the creative tension between the two.
Maclear (Julia Child, 2014, etc.) has written books for children and adults and some that blur the distinction with appeal for both, but she has never written a book quite like this. Also, few other books on birding are anything like this, for her “observation” is mainly restricted to urban Toronto, where the kinds of birds she sees aren’t likely to be exotic. What grabs and holds readers’ attention is the author’s own attention, as she describes in detail what she is seeing, how she is feeling, and how her perception and perspective are both shifting, however subtly. She began her unlikely bird year during “the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn’t know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should….I had lost the beat.” Her father was ailing, her work was faltering, and, in what she calls her “roomy marriage,” she needed to explore something outside. “In my husband’s presence,” she writes, “I have felt my solitude dissolve, but I have also felt lonelier than the moon; such are the contradictions of intimacy.” The simple precision of Maclear’s prose belies the depth, as if the book were the tip of the iceberg and what she has elided or omitted constitutes the rest. She attached herself to a birding musician as a guide (her husband is also a musician; neither is named in the text), and it was through what she experienced with him that she discovered new ways of seeing and being. “The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things,” she discovered. By this point, she had outgrown the need for a guide.
Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5420-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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