A compelling, often surprising account of a Colorado wildlife sanctuary.
The Shellenbargers celebrate a sanctuary for America’s many captive bears and big cats in this work of nonfiction.
In 2020, America got to know Joe Exotic and his exotic animal park thanks to the hit Netflix documentary series Tiger King. But what happens to animals when they are no longer owned by the Joe Exotics of the world? Melanie and Mark Shellenbarger offer this portrait of a very different kind of exotic animal facility—the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado. Started by Pat Craig in the 1980s, the current facility is home to 500-plus animals, including bears, lions, and tigers—including 42 former residents of Joe Exotic’s zoo. All the sanctuary’s animals have been rescued from various states of captivity, from roadside attractions and shuttered circuses to people’s backyards. Some of them come from abroad, like Lambert and Tasha Joy, a lion and tigress rescued from a typhoon-decimated zoo in the North Mariana Islands. The animals had been so isolated that they had not even been socialized in the normal sounds made by their respective species: “Lambert did not know he was a lion and Tasha Joy seemed clueless about the fact that she was a tiger....Having been purchased as cubs from a Guam zoo fifteen years before, both had lived in solitary confinement in the intervening years and simply did not know how to talk.” The book chronicles the origins and operations of the sanctuary, including its many remarkable rescue stories, while also providing commentary on the current “captive wildlife crisis.” The Shellenbargers’ prose is clear and passionate—they admit to learning about both the sanctuary and the crisis relatively recently, and they preach with the strength of the converted. While the book has a strong point of view, it’s generally persuasive, especially when the reader sees the before-and-after photos of some of the rescued animals. (The book’s full-color photography is one of its strongest attributes.) For those fascinated by the world of Tiger King, the book provides further information on the world of captive wildlife and the ways people are working to improve the lives of the animals.
A compelling, often surprising account of a Colorado wildlife sanctuary.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66290-319-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Pyree Square Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 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
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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