As unpretentious as a tapas bar, and as brimming with savory morsels.
In a highly likable debut, former British journalist Evans tours Spain on her bicycle.
It’s a very straightforward affair: the author pedals her way through the Pyrenees, then hops a plane south to explore the area between Grenada and Jerez before jumping north once more to take in the wonderful Extremadura. First and foremost, she explains the tapas: “The Spanish like to drink for hours on end . . . but they don’t like to get drunk. And so they snack.” Little rounds of bread and bacalao, eggs with mayonnaise, squares of potato omelet, pickled herring, marinated eel, a small slice of tripe, all find their way down the author’s gullet, and she describes them with such relish it feels as if we’re eating along with her. Meanwhile, equally vivid are her encounters with living creatures (dogs, hogs, unpleasant hostel keepers). Evans only glancingly delineates the landscapes she passes through, though she makes up for that with long rambles through the countryside’s history—and Spain is nothing if not full of outrageous history. The writer has a fine time with Juana the Mad, so fiercely possessive of her husband that she refused to have him buried and instead “embarked on a tour of Spain with Felipe’s fast-rotting corpse.” She also does well with Wilfred the Hairy of Catalonia, the unfortunate fate of the Duchess of Alba’s feet, the little cider mill that acted as a safe house for downed pilots during WWII, and the plague of witches that visited Zugarramurdi in the 13th century. She gets bonked, a cycling term for the discombobulation that ensues from spending more calories in a day than you put in the body, and she suffers faulty directions from all sorts of deceptive and cruel experts. The trip ends in the Extremadura countryside, with Evans cycling by “the occasional aged farmer with his donkey tilling the land and, every now and then, a posse of black-haired pigs.”
As unpretentious as a tapas bar, and as brimming with savory morsels.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-81556-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bantam UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of...
Known for his self-deprecating wit and the harmlessly eccentric antics of his family, Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day, 2000, etc.) can also pinch until it hurts in this collection of autobiographical vignettes.
Once again we are treated to the author’s gift for deadpan humor, especially when poking fun at his family and neighbors. He draws some of the material from his youth, like the portrait of the folks across the street who didn’t own a TV (“What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?” he wonders) and went trick-or-treating on November first. Or the story of the time his mother, after a fifth snow day in a row, chucked all the Sedaris kids out the door and locked it. To get back in, the older kids devised a plan wherein the youngest, affection-hungry Tiffany, would be hit by a car: “Her eagerness to please is absolute and naked. When we ask her to lie in the middle of the street, her only question was ‘Where?’ ” Some of the tales cover more recent incidents, such as his sister’s retrieval of a turkey from a garbage can; when Sedaris beards her about it, she responds, “Listen to you. If it didn’t come from Balducci’s, if it wasn’t raised on polenta and wild baby acorns, it has to be dangerous.” But family members’ square-peggedness is more than a little pathetic, and the fact that they are fodder for his stories doesn’t sit easy with Sedaris. He’ll quip, “Your life, your privacy, your occasional sorrow—it’s not like you're going to do anything with it,” as guilt pokes its nose around the corner of the page. Then he’ll hitch himself up and lacerate them once again, but not without affection even when the sting is strongest. Besides, his favorite target is himself: his obsessive-compulsiveness and his own membership in this company of oddfellows.
Sedaris’s sense of life’s absurdity is on full, fine display, as is his emotional body armor. Fortunately, he has plenty of both.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-14346-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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