An engrossing, thorough, and revealing portrait of a beloved beachside community confronting disaster.
A writer offers stories of California residents caught in the flames of a deadly wildfire.
On Nov. 9, 2018, the Woolsey Fire spread from Simi Valley to Malibu, destroying 100,000 acres of land and forcing 250,000 people to evacuate. What debut author, actor, and longtime resident Kerbeck remembers of that day is “the terror of thinking you’re about to be burned alive in front of your kid.” His book, a collection of tales blending memoir, investigative journalism, and narrative, begins with his own harrowing account of the fire’s rapid descent toward his home. The author then goes on to reconstruct the stories of his neighbors. There are plenty of shocking close calls with “flaming embers”—one standout is the experience of Tanesha Lockhart, who had to “shelter in place” with the youths of a detention center. But Kerbeck also uses the residents’ recollections as a springboard to reach deep into the history of Malibu and the questions of liability surrounding California wildfires. Stars like Bob Dylan and Sean Penn make cameos, but what is more important to the author is the community of Malibu that exists at the edges of its multimillion-dollar homes: the Morra family, which struggled, ultimately in vain, to buy a fire engine dedicated to locals; Valerie Sklarevsky, a hippie activist who lived in a covered wagon; and the Gonzalezes, who built their own doomed, wooden home themselves. Throughout these and the other tales, the author deftly digs into the terror of that day, the deep connections these people felt to the land, and the varying factors that played a role in the Woolsey fire’s rapid development. His ample research allows him to makes surprising connections, linking the fire to the electric provider’s mismanagement and even possibly to nuclear testing in the 1950s while providing a thorough examination of the volunteer and Los Angeles County fire departments. Kerbeck writes about policy and history with the same urgency that he brings to cars engulfed in flames. And he focuses on just the right details—such as a high school production of Spring Awakening and a lost collection of airplane models—to give a robust and very human face to Malibu and the increasingly frequent dangers it faces.
An engrossing, thorough, and revealing portrait of a beloved beachside community confronting disaster.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73347-053-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: MWC Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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