Candid memories placidly told.
Recollections of a childhood beset by pain.
An award-winning fiction writer, essayist, and memoirist, Martin (b. 1955) creates an affecting portrait of his troubled childhood in a small Illinois farming town. “My house, when I was young, was a house of sorrow,” he writes. As the author recounted in a previous memoir, his father was the source of that sorrow. After losing both hands in a farming accident, he became a man consumed with anger, “whose intense love often got swallowed up inside his rage.” Martin’s mother, a schoolteacher, was a gentle, soft-spoken woman who nurtured her son’s love of reading and writing and tried, as well as she could, to temper her husband’s abusive rages. Martin recalls his loneliness as an only child, teachers who encouraged him, and his envy of other families who seemed far happier than his own. “It would take me years and years to escape the anger of that house,” he writes, “and even now, when I live a more gentle life, I still feel like I’m fighting the rage my father left inside me, always trying to tamp it down, always on guard against its return.” As a teenager, Martin became increasingly rebellious, exacerbating conflicts with his father. By his second year of high school, he describes himself as a “juvenile delinquent,” shoplifting, engaging in petty crime, and roaming the streets at night with a rough crowd. But he turned himself around and left his small town to make a life for himself elsewhere. “If anyone left the area—either to visit family in some far-off place or to move away for good—folks said they’d gone the hard road,” he writes. Martin’s hard road involved recognizing his emotional legacy: inheriting from his father a constant feeling of wariness against forces that were “waiting to hurt me” and from his mother, a desire to believe in a God who will keep him “safe and free from harm.”
Candid memories placidly told.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-253-05386-2
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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