A nimble exploration of the ways our diverse bodies interact with the world around us.
A granular inquiry into a fascinating question: “Who is the world designed for?”
Hendren, an artist and design researcher who teaches design for disability at the Olin College of Engineering, enthusiastically studies how both abled and disabled bodies confront the relative rigidity or flexibility of the built world and how disability derives in part by the (built) shape of the world, its rigid and scripted sense of what the body can do, and how it organizes space. “It’s the interaction between the conditions of the body and the shapes of the world that make disability into a lived experience,” writes the author, “and therefore a matter not only for individuals but also for societies.” She dissects the prevalence of “average,” its physical and moral qualities and its false projection of cultural worth. Hendren sees the world as it might flex and bend to better fit a variety of interpretations of universal ideas. It’s about being adaptive, acknowledging how environments can be built to compensate for our bodily limitations or to refine our capacities. The aim, writes the author, is for “workhorse pragmatism” and “charismatic” presence. With intimacy, curiosity, and a bright sense of possibility, Hendren investigates the creation of elegantly designed prostheses from low-cost, readily available materials, devices whose social meaning does not preclude alternate possibilities of individual experience. She also considers the three-dimensionality of sign language and its distinct sensory ecology. Most pointedly, perhaps, the author investigates the concept of dependency. “Dependency and the care it requires,” she writes, “may be the most distilled definition of disability and also the most universal. Some scholars claim that disability may well be ‘the fundamental of human embodiment.’ The fundamental aspect? What a notion—that the universalizing experience of disability, states of dimensional dependence from our infancy through the end of life, might be the central fact of having a body, or rather being a body.”
A nimble exploration of the ways our diverse bodies interact with the world around us.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2000-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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