by Vijay R. Nathan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2018
A deftly composed collection of poems on the struggle to find meaning in modern life.
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Hollywood stars seek enlightenment in this volume of poetry.
Sadhana is a yogic term for “a means of accomplishing something.” In this collection, Nathan imagines the sadhana of various Hollywood celebrities with his tongue very much in cheek. Natalie Portman admires the quirkiness of Winona Ryder: “Winona is the kind of crazy that Natalie will love / even after she drinks all her beer / & wrecks her truck.” Shia LaBeouf takes inspiration from Joaquin Phoenix’s esoteric performance art: “Shia remembers / that time when everyone thought / Joaquin went AWOL from / acting & became a rapper. / Shia is a bona fide fashion icon / & Joaquin has rounded up the actor- / artist’s finest ’fits to prove it.” Jeff Bridges encounters Keanu Reeves eating a sandwich: “Now, let’s just permit / this fear to engulf us for a moment / & not do our normal thing,” the grizzled actor tells the famously serene one. Jodie Foster and Sasha Baron Cohen discuss ancient Buddhist masters: Baron Cohen’s “joke is to show Jodie / a doughnut, eat it, tell her where / it’s been, then reveal / that it wasn’t a doughnut.” These celebrities search for wisdom in one another, music, isolation, and snippets of Eastern philosophical traditions that they may or may not completely understand. (Baron Cohen discusses the 15th-century monk Drukpa Kunley in his Borat voice: “When will I have big penis like / this Bhutanese poet yogi?”) Are these stars any closer to understanding than the rest of humanity? Are they further away?
Nathan proves himself a versatile poet, switching registers between the comic and the serious as well as impersonating different voices. Several poems are written from the perspective of a TMZ–like entertainment news service, which is just as interested in celebrities’ spiritual pursuits as it is in whatever else they do: “You may not have heard, but / our sources tell us Joaquin Phoenix, the star / of Gladiator, aged 42, prepares / to spend the next year on retreat / in a cave. / We were like, ‘OMG / WHAT?’ / Phoenix renounces / his Hollywood lifestyle in favor / of an underground chamber / in the Mojave Desert where / he expects to achieve complete & total / enlightenment.” The author also summons the aesthetics of various filmmakers in poems like “A Shia LaBeouf Dream (dir. Terrence Malick)” and “A Winona Ryder Dream (dir. Tim Burton).” The poems are narratives and very much flow one into the next, with the same cast of actors reappearing and comingling. Nathan is skilled at crafting a succinct, evocative image. He describes Bridges as “a man who fits / perfectly into the clothes / of passing strangers.” LaBeouf’s sex dream includes the lines “Hands tighten around the shaft / as minds pronk off / to starlit savannas.” But the most impressive aspect of the collection is that it transcends its gimmicky conceit to challenge readers to engage sincerely with the notion of enlightenment. By the end of the volume, neither the audience nor the poet is condescending to LaBeouf or Ryder. Instead, all are acclimated to the reality that they are all blindly searching, all absurdly lost.
A deftly composed collection of poems on the struggle to find meaning in modern life.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-4438-9
Page Count: 60
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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New York Times Bestseller
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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