A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.
Life lessons gleaned from the work of a musical theater master.
Drama professor and devoted fan Schoch, author of Shakespeare’s House, lovingly explores Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, aiming to show how they can help people achieve a more fulfilling life. “His works understand us as much as we understand them,” the author avers. Zeroing in on 13 shows, he enthusiastically walks us through the essence of each to demonstrate that “Sondheim, if we let him, can change our life.” Schoch notes that in his first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim tried to impart the lesson, “Be aware of the roles that you enact in your life,” but it was a flop because he forgot to “put the audience first.” He never forgot it again. Gypsy tells the story of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, but the vivid characterizations expressed in song demonstrate that “hurtful patterns can be disrupted and then replaced by the benevolence of a nurturing heart, beginning with our own.” In the plotless Company, Sondheim anatomizes the “loneliness of modern urban life,” then suggests how we can overcome it in the song “Sorry-Grateful” (a “true masterpiece”). “Whenever I hear the quintet in A Little Night Music warming up,” Schoch writes, “I hear a rehearsal for life.” Sweeney Todd, the ultimate revenge piece, asks us how we would respond to injustice. Merrily We Roll Along, poorly received when it opened in 1981 but a Tony-winning hit in 2024, oozes with feelings of personal regret. On Sunday in the Park With George, Schoch remarks, “How can we not pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?” Into the Woods confronts “not knowing which path to choose,” and Schoch softly brings down the curtain with Here We Are, which opened in 2023, two years after Sondheim’s death: “a perfect theatrical non finito: not finished, and that’s by design.”
A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781668030592
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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