A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.
A Southerner examines a complicated region.
Since August 2015, Renkl has contributed essays about the South to the New York Times, reflecting on nature and the environment, politics and religion, social justice, family and community, and arts and culture. From her home in Nashville—“a blue dot in the red sea of Tennessee”—she writes perceptively of the region where she was born and raised (in Alabama), educated (in South Carolina), and settled. “All I can do,” she writes, “is try to make it clear that there is far more to this intricate region than many people understand.” Of the nearly 60 essays she has gathered in what she calls a “patchwork quilt” collection, some are journalistic, some polemical, and some frankly personal: her son’s marriage during the pandemic, for one, and a long-deferred visit to Graceland. In many, Renkl vividly evokes the lush natural beauty of the rivers, old-growth forests, “red-dirt pineywoods,” marshes, and coastal plains that she deeply loves. As she shows, that land is in peril. The Tennessee River is polluted with microplastics; habitat destruction threatens monarch butterflies; climate change alters the trajectory of migratory birds. Renkl reports on efforts to address these and other problems that beset the region, including opioid addiction, gun violence, and racism. In Tennessee, she writes, tactics to suppress votes include confiscating driver’s licenses, impeding mail-in ballots, and “disqualifying voter registration applications for specious reasons.” Later, she notes that “Election Law Journal ranked Tennessee forty-eighth in ease of voting” (ahead of Virginia and Mississippi). Nevertheless, Renkl finds hope for change. “I know that Southern hospitality is a real thing, and that it isn’t race contingent,” she writes. “I know how very many people here are fighting to make life safer and more equitable for everyone, even for those who keep voting to make life less safe and less fair for everyone else.”
A wide-ranging look at the realities of the South.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-57131-184-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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 pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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