An unflinchingly honest portrait of grief and survival that many fellow travelers will find comforting.
A veteran journalist shares the anguish of losing a son to suicide in this debut memoir that tracks her painful path to acceptance.
On Aug. 28, 2010, Thomson received a devastating phone call from her daughter-in-law. Kieran, the author’s son from her first marriage, had fatally shot himself. He was just a few months shy of his 23rd birthday, married, and the father of an almost 2-year-old daughter, Ailbe. In January 2009, he had enlisted in the Army. The decision filled Thomson with alarm, but Kieran was convinced this was his best option. He was trained as a medic, and he and his family were living at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, awaiting his deployment to Afghanistan. Kieran became one of 14 suicides at Fort Bragg that year. The narrative shifts back and forth seamlessly between present and past. Everything during the next two years triggered a memory from all the yesterdays with Kieran. The author reviews the pivotal events in his life—his birth in London; Thomson and her son’s move to her home in Tennessee; her new marriage; the birth of her son Matthew; and Kieran’s troubled teenage years. She writes: “Something, it seemed, wasn’t quite right” early on. Kieran was diagnosed with a newly classified learning disability that made social interactions difficult. The author brings readers along with her through the emotionally wrenching ordeal of a memorial service at Fort Bragg, the funeral in Middle Tennessee, and another memorial service at her family church in Memphis—all articulately and painstakingly chronicled. She muses: “Death seems to have a lot to do with logistics, I think. Moving from point A to point B.” But suicide adds its own excruciating dimension to the tragedy, telling “the shell-shocked survivor in the most horrific way imaginable that no matter what you did, it wasn’t enough.” Still, after two meticulously documented years of pushing through a gripping and toxic mix of sorrow, wide-ranging anger, and guilt, she takes a wonderfully surprising “leap” toward the future.
An unflinchingly honest portrait of grief and survival that many fellow travelers will find comforting.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-693-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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