A dazzling riff on human beings and their weird ways “written” by an 18th-century tortoise that lived for years in the garden of English naturalist/curate Gilbert White and appeared in White’s The Natural History of Selborne (1789).
The shell of the actual Timothy now resides in a London museum and once covered a female, not a male (as White had mistakenly concluded). The Timothy that Klinkenborg (The Rural Life, 2002, etc.), a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, imagines is a fascinating creature with a brisk prose style (many short, sharp sentences and fragments) and significant observations about how we humans look, act and think. Timothy is troubled by the determination of the English to manicure and control the countryside (his single “escape” is prompted by his desire to find a place where he can “live in the ancient disorder of nature again”). He ponders our insistence on classifying the natural world, and he is puzzled by our gait, our failure to recognize that we are animals, our short lives, our burial practices, our clothing, our religion and our sex acts. On virtually every page is a phrase or sentence that entertains or amuses or informs. (“A tortoise,” he says, “lives even longer than a bishop.”) Timothy recognizes that we are a dangerous species: “The worst of their character,” he says of us, “so often prevails.” He expatiates upon chelonian sex and observes that reptiles present “no pretense of fidelity” the way humans do. He wonders about war, about our belief that the world exists for our use alone, about our fear of death—and our fear of life.
Timothy the tortoise is a splendid social critic, a keen-eyed anthropologist who sees far beyond his shell.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-679-40728-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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With this detailed, versatile cookbook, readers can finally make Momofuku Milk Bar’s inventive, decadent desserts at home, or see what they’ve been missing.
In this successor to the Momofuku cookbook, Momofuku Milk Bar’s pastry chef hands over the keys to the restaurant group’s snack-food–based treats, which have had people lining up outside the door of the Manhattan bakery since it opened. The James Beard Award–nominated Tosi spares no detail, providing origin stories for her popular cookies, pies and ice-cream flavors. The recipes are meticulously outlined, with added tips on how to experiment with their format. After “understanding how we laid out this cookbook…you will be one of us,” writes the author. Still, it’s a bit more sophisticated than the typical Betty Crocker fare. In addition to a healthy stock of pretzels, cornflakes and, of course, milk powder, some recipes require readers to have feuilletine and citric acid handy, to perfect the art of quenelling. Acolytes should invest in a scale, thanks to Tosi’s preference of grams (“freedom measurements,” as the friendlier cups and spoons are called, are provided, but heavily frowned upon)—though it’s hard to be too pretentious when one of your main ingredients is Fruity Pebbles. A refreshing, youthful cookbook that will have readers happily indulging in a rising pastry-chef star’s widely appealing treats.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-72049-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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