An eloquent and timely search for meaning.
A San Franciscan takes walks to reconnect with her city at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in this memoir.
“Living solo in a shut-down world is not all that much fun,” remarks travel writer Romanov, drawing from the journal she kept in early 2020 as the novel coronavirus spread across the country. As her hometown of San Francisco went into lockdown, she felt as though she were “shutting down with it.” A friend recommended a book of travel stories to her—The Art of Pilgrimage (1998) by Phil Cousineau—which inspired her to alter her own life. She decided to make her own pilgrimage by walking the streets of San Francisco, searching for the essence of her city and of herself. This book describes seven days in which the author explored such diverse locations as Potrero Hill, the Fillmore District, and Baker Beach. As she sees the city with new eyes, she makes surprising connections to her childhood spent in a refugee camp in Trieste, Italy, in the early 1950s and bonds with people she encounters along the way. Romanov’s personal pilgrimage charts a poignant journey from a sense of self-loss to one of inner peace. Her elegantly descriptive prose conveys her wonder at the city’s unpredictability: “I drop onto a hidden stairway that splits like the entry to a gracious manor. One block later Vallejo Street opens to a beautiful garden stairway…I am immediately pulled to it and head up those stairs.” The author subtly imparts details of her past, skillfully interweaving descriptions of contemporary San Francisco and flashbacks. On visiting the old Potrero Power Plant, she notes: “it could easily be an old prison. Or an old refugee camp. I wonder how I could be heading to Hunters Point and end up in Trieste?” The author is occasionally prone to repetition; for instance, she explains white flighton multiple occasions. However, this doesn’t detract from a thoroughly researched study that imparts a wealth of knowledge regarding San Francisco’s topography and history, illustrated with the author’s black-and-white photography.
An eloquent and timely search for meaning.Pub Date: June 6, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-98587-810-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Solificatio
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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