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 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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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