by Robin Wall Kimmerer ; illustrated by John Burgoyne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 2024
A welcome meditation on living in harmony with the earth and fostering deeper connections with one another.
Learning from the land.
Kimmerer, drawing from her Potawatomi heritage, uses the abundant serviceberry to demonstrate the gifts that the natural world provides, highlighting the “enoughness” of these gifts if we choose to view them as such. For a society consumed by consumption, this portrait is startling in its simplicity. “Recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more,” Kimmerer writes. While the prose occasionally verges on saccharine, each word is clearly chosen with care and deliberation, resulting in a masterful reflection on ecology and culture. The book seamlessly blends science, inherited wisdom, and philosophy, urging readers to reconsider their relationship with the environment and society. Kimmerer pushes back against the individualism and scarcity mindsets entrenched in our interactions, encouraging us to draw inspiration from the natural world and Indigenous knowledge systems. Rather than the exploitative system of modern capitalism, which can be damaging to both the earth and our relationships, Kimmerer invites readers to envision a life that embraces the gift economy—one built on reciprocity, collective well-being, and care. She writes, “When we speak of [sustenance provided from the land] not as things or natural resources or commodities, but as gifts, our whole relationship to the natural world changes.” Despite the dire repercussions of not living in harmony with nature, her beautiful and hopeful prose leaves readers feeling sated, galvanized, and keenly aware of the world around them.
A welcome meditation on living in harmony with the earth and fostering deeper connections with one another.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781668072240
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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by Robin Wall Kimmerer ; adapted by Monique Gray Smith ; illustrated by Nicole Neidhardt
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by Amy Tan ; illustrated by Amy Tan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 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
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by Amy Tan
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by Amy Tan
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by Amy Tan
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SEEN & HEARD
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2024
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
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