Seeking to be ``free to explore the universe within,'' free- lance writer Modzelewski (Sports Illustrated, Outside, etc.) spent 18 months on an islet near Vancouver Island. Modzelewski's sojourn on Swanson Island was inspired in part by his admiration for Zen masters and mountain men such as Jeremiah Johnson. He sought hardships away from people, cities, ski resorts, and college, because ``sometimes you have to lower your standard of living to reach a higher level.'' The owner of the island is Will Malloff, a ``mechanical wizard and woodworker extraordinaire'' as well as a ``healer'' who goes off alone to the woods in an attempt to heal his own lung cancer. Malloff is a fascinating characteronly not as the pure mountain man/mystic of Modzelewski's fantasy, but as a realistic bridge between modern ``civilization'' and romantic notions of getting ``back to nature.'' Some of his working tools, axes and scythes, a few found, others made or purchased, are to Modzelewski ``objets d`art''; it's no accident, Modzelewski notes, that the older tools work best, doing ``minimum damage to the earth and keeping you strong in the process.'' The author's contacts with wildlife belie his underdeveloped, perhaps naive belief in a mystical universe: an injured bald eagle he rescued and nursed, died. When, around the same time, a feather fell from the sky, he ``accepted it as sacred.'' He delivers a sound, informative natural history of cetaceans, but when a killer whale surfaced, near his skiff, ``I touched the whale; she touched me; and what passed between us changed me forever.'' One can only wonder if it was as good for the whale, too. Modzelewski's scenes of salmon fishing, profiles of local characters, observations on a giant octopus, explorations of other islands are solidly wrought. A kind of New Age natural history, hokey but engrossing. (Illustrationsnot seen.)
Pub Date: May 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016533-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.
A new life and book arise from the ashes of a devastating California wildfire.
These days, it seems the fires will never end. They wreaked destruction over central California in the latter months of 2018, dominating headlines for weeks, barely a year after Fies (Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, 2009) lost nearly everything to the fires that raged through Northern California. The result is a vividly journalistic graphic narrative of resilience in the face of tragedy, an account of recent history that seems timely as ever. “A two-story house full of our lives was a two-foot heap of dead smoking ash,” writes the author about his first return to survey the damage. The matter-of-fact tone of the reportage makes some of the flights of creative imagination seem more extraordinary—particularly a nihilistic, two-page centerpiece of a psychological solar system in which “the fire is our black hole,” and “some veer too near and are drawn into despair, depression, divorce, even suicide,” while “others are gravitationally flung entirely out of our solar system to other cities or states, and never seen again.” Yet the stories that dominate the narrative are those of the survivors, who were part of the community and would be part of whatever community would be built to take its place across the charred landscape. Interspersed with the author’s own account are those from others, many retirees, some suffering from physical or mental afflictions. Each is rendered in a couple pages of text except one from a fellow cartoonist, who draws his own. The project began with an online comic when Fies did the only thing he could as his life was reduced to ash and rubble. More than 3 million readers saw it; this expanded version will hopefully extend its reach.
Drawings, words, and a few photos combine to convey the depth of a tragedy that would leave most people dumbstruck.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3585-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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