An aesthetically pleasing but limited tourist guide to Ireland.
A pocket-size manual offers advice to travelers planning to visit Ireland for the first time.
After touring Ireland in search of her maternal ancestry, Lee became intoxicated with a strange land that quickly felt like home. In order to help others visiting Ireland have the best experience possible, she prepared a “handmade field guide,” a travel reference work in the form of a spiral notebook that neatly fits in a jacket pocket. The author provides a lucid summary of the country’s history and traditions—she begins by reconstructing Ireland’s prehistoric existence based on archaeological evidence of its geological evolution and its first inhabitants, roughly 9,000 years ago. Lee also furnishes an abridged tour of the nation’s religious character, mythology, festivals, and trees and even provides a guide to the modern pronunciation of its language. She also includes lists, collected by region, of all the “places of interest” readers may want to visit. The entire book is beautifully illustrated with the author’s hand-drawn maps and pictures. The maps, like the work itself, are best suited for acquiring a general picture of Ireland’s topography rather than for navigating the terrain. For all of its virtues and unmistakable charm, Lee’s field guide is likely most useful as an introduction to Ireland before readers arrive. The manual will be of limited value once they get there. There is really no need to carry the work while enjoying Ireland’s wonders, despite the fact that it was designed for that purpose. The author seems to understand this, which is precisely why she includes on a list of “items to pack” GPS and maps. Similarly, the long catalog of places to visit lacks full explanations. She encourages readers to see the Brownshill dolmen but doesn’t describe its attractions or even explain what a dolmen is.
An aesthetically pleasing but limited tourist guide to Ireland. (maps, charts)Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9915022-8-8
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Leslie Lee Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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