paper 1-55553-343-4 Following the route taken by Thoreau during his 1849 sojourn on Cape Cod, Mulloney, in his debut, seeks to chart the harmonies and dissonances between now and then. Smitten by the transcendentalist’s Cape Cod at a time when he was looking for direction in his life (this is confided to readers in the introduction, whereafter he pretty much absents himself from the narrative), Mulloney decided to walk in Thoreau’s footprints along the cape’s outer beach, hoofing the strand from Orleans to Provincetown. Fortunately, Mulloney doesn’t stifle his book by adhering to every jot and tittle of Thoreau’s itinerary—and he probably couldn’t have, considering the cape’s ever- changing topography. He just wants to get a shot at some of the sublime intimations Thoreau experienced and to see how things have changed. Mulloney was prepared for the excursion. He was previously a reporter for a cape TV station; he boned up on his coastal geology and botany and bird life; he delved deeply into the cape’s embarrassment of literary riches. So he is able to speak with familiarity of poverty grass and skate eggs, kettles and drumlins, the cape-tethered writings of Henry Beston and Norman Mailer and Cynthia Huntington. But there is little in the way of personal insight. As he makes his way up the forearm of the cape, he bounces between nuggets of historical interest and his own everyday encounters, slips in mini-lectures on natural history, knits Thoreau’s trip to his own, all in a tone of unstinting and nonjudgmental bonhomie. Confronted with RVs or the spread of malls or the disputatious Cape Cod Commission, Mulloney will choose a rowboat every time. And like Thoreau, he has a taste for bad puns: Gazing upon a gnarled pine that reminds him of musical notation, he suggests, “Sea sharp?” An eager but soulless pocket tour of the outer shores of Cape Cod: bright, conversant, and without much personality. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 30, 1998
ISBN: 1-55553-344-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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