An earnest but somewhat slapdash book of nature images.
Sarafin celebrates the natural beauty of Arizona in this debut photography and essay collection.
As a nature photographer and dedicated hiker, the author knows the joys of discovering awe-inspiring sights in the great outdoors. When people specifically search for beauty in nature, she notes, they can’t help but come across something majestic: “Perhaps it is only that we discover what we are seeking when we are totally focused on it,” writes Sarafin, “and if our civilized world is always distracting us then how are we ever to discover the riches of the Great Mystery presented to us on a daily basis?” This book collects many amazing images that Sarafin captured on film during her travels through the deserts of Arizona, including depictions of birds, animals, plants, landscapes, and rock faces adorned with ancient petroglyphs. She often captions the photos with inspirational sayings from such famous figures as Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Emily Dickinson, and Henri Matisse. The book also includes 10 single-page essays describing some of her favorite encounters, such as a time when she stopped to play her cedar flute by a pond and saw that the fish had formed a perfect circle, apparently in reaction to the music. Sarafin’s prose is conversational but animated by a spiritual love of nature, as when she describes a chance meeting with a lizard “doing that little up and down motion that lizards do. I call it dancing—and they call it announcing/defending their territory.” The photos, however, remain the highlight of the book, and some of them are quite striking. In the end, though, the volume has an inescapable scrapbooklike feel, and the typeface, quotes, and diaristic essays give the work a thrown-together quality that may put off some readers. Those who know the Arizona landscape may be a bit more intrigued, but in general, the book feels too personal to inspire more than a vague desire to go on a hike—and perhaps learn to play the cedar flute.
An earnest but somewhat slapdash book of nature images.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-41961-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lizard Dance Productions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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