A time-honoring narrative: Descriptive, contemplative, and a prod to get on with it ourselves.
As though she had taken a vow to awareness, Watkins, a musician and travel essayist, pays attention to the everyday elements as well as the grand themes in her globe-girdling journey.
At the age of 60, Watkins takes a trip around the world, to clean out the cobwebs and keep herself fresh. She has traveled before, so she is comfortable enough on the road, and she has served as a host family for numerous students studying abroad, so she has contacts aplenty to soften her landings at such outposts as Nepal and New Delhi. Watkins has a talent for expressing both innocence and worldliness, a combination that gives her words the weight of an Old Soul with the clarity that can come from experience in life. Certainly, she knows what impresses and pleases and challenges her. She can speak with sureness of her love for James Joyce as she walks the streets of Zurich or of the breath-catching beauty of the Taj Mahal, where it stands sadly wreathed in foul air beside a polluted river. Without a lot of finger-pointing and lecturing, Watkins conveys a strong moral compass: “The rich people of the world . . . need to sacrifice our superfluous luxuries that are robbing the earth and depriving the poor.” Words like these come convincingly, for she has witnessed firsthand and across cultures the deleterious effects of such waste. And Watkins’s writings on her own circumstances—triggered by some sight or sound or memory—are restrained and polished with reflection, whether the subject is the pleasure of silence she learned as a member of a Quaker family, or a mother’s most terrible plaint, losing a son, gone in an instant: “And, oh, I had not been there to comfort him in his dying as I had been present to hold him in my arms at his birth.”
A time-honoring narrative: Descriptive, contemplative, and a prod to get on with it ourselves.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58005-064-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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