A valuable take on a canonical writer, highlighting how good work stands the test of time.
An enjoyable exploration of how Hemingway’s influence on American literature continues to be significant.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway gave a direct instruction to writers: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Find the essential truth of the story, and the rest will eventually follow—profound, yes, but surprisingly difficult to do. Cirino and Von Cannon, academics who share a special interest in Hemingway, have been pursuing this idea for years, especially via their One True Podcast. This collection brings together the best of the interviews and adds some other material. Each interviewee was asked to pick their favorite Hemingway sentence (although some pick a paragraph or several sentences) and explain what it means to them. Some examine a sparse, compact line. Others opt for one of Hemingway’s long, swirling sentences. This underlines the variety of Hemingway’s writing as well as his capacity to imply volumes in a few words. Several contributors discuss why Hemingway’s writing has endured, pointing to his focus on the evergreen themes of love, loss, and war. Others note the time and consideration that Hemingway put into his craft, with endless redrafting and rethinking, as well as his embrace of a wide range of the human experience. As he demonstrated, writing is not, in fact, particularly difficult; doing it well and making it look easy, however, is. This is one of the keys to Hemingway: polishing the text until the effort seems to disappear and the authenticity shines through. This is summed up by a line that several writers point to as their inspiration—the concluding line from The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Yes, it is. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick co-wrote the foreword, and contributors include Valerie Hemingway, Elizabeth Strout, Sherman Alexie, Paula McLain, Craig Johnson, Joshua Ferris, Russell Banks, and Pam Houston.
A valuable take on a canonical writer, highlighting how good work stands the test of time.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-56792-713-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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