Real people sharing their thoughts in different ways makes for a compelling and heartfelt compilation.
Hasan Ali’s collection of journal entries serves up wisdom, humor, and life lessons.
Taken from the journal entries of visitors to more than 100 community green spaces created by the nonprofit group Nature Sacred, this volume compiles writings submitted over the past 25 years. The pieces—by turns funny, sad, practical, inspiring, and frivolous—come from numerous locations, including the Mt. Washington Arboretum in Baltimore, Maryland; the Naval Cemetery Landscape in Brooklyn, New York; the Brenton Arboretum in Dallas Center, Iowa; the Life Garden at Fort Payne Walking Park in Fort Payne, Alabama; and the Terrace Garden at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, Oregon, among many others. The topics are divided into five categories: nature’s healing power, hardship and hope, encouraging words, wisdoms and life lessons, and connections and community. The contributions include crude stick figure drawings and more elaborate illustrations, laconic wisdom (“I came to talk to the willows. They speak very slowly. No rush”) and intricate prose and poetry. Visitors were invited to add anything they liked to the journals, including jokes and life news (“My first baby was born two days ago!”) as well as musings that are quite philosophical and esoteric. It’s a convenient text that one can pick up when the impulse strikes, read for a few minutes, and receive a wide variety of thoughts and perspectives in different writing and drawing styles. Some of the best material comes from children; Dylan writes, “If anything goes wrong remember it could be worse.” Seven-year-old Ella reports: “I love this plase becus this book breegs all of are feelings togethr.” One of the joys of this compilation is the way that passages like these live side-by-side with others from more veteran writers (and spellers). It’s a book that will sneak up on you—a beautiful collection of voices from the past quarter-century.
Real people sharing their thoughts in different ways makes for a compelling and heartfelt compilation.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9798218154554
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nature Sacred
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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