A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.
A brief collection of essays in search of solace in a time of global upheaval.
The “bright unbearable reality” of the title comes from a translation of the Greek word enargeia, which poet Alice Oswald uses to describe “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.” Badkhen explores this idea in her preface, asking, “Why do we find it unbearable to acknowledge what truly is?” Via a series of ethereal scholarly essays, the author aims to find a better way to see and understand grief, especially as embodied in the world’s migrant crisis. Badkhen recounts her travels around the globe and bolsters her experiences with a dizzying wealth of literary and artistic touchstones. Hazily poetic, she constructs her essays like a collagist, in search of the untapped resonance that can be channeled when seemingly incongruous ideas are placed in proximity. In “Landscape With Icarus,” she presents facts about children seeking asylum next to vignettes about the Pied Piper, who, according to some legends, lured children into exodus. Badkhen later invokes Auden’s poem on Brueghel’s painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” a busy seaside scene in which Icarus is barely discernible, having crashed into the surf. “Where is the child, where is Icarus?” she asks. “Only the faint plunging legs twitch their last dance beneath the slim-crescent drift of feathers, and fingers grasp uselessly at a wave, and a vague splash forever rends your heart.” Another essay superimposes a trumpet player in the “pogromed neighborhood” of Greenwood, Tulsa, with tales of horns found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and the falling walls of Jericho. When these layers stack up, an ominous feeling creeps in: Could our contemporary traumas be simply the continuation of a millennia-old, ineffable trajectory? Perhaps, but Badkhen offers glimmers of hope: “Imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the polythreaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love.”
A soulful, ambitious quest for a path through centuries of loss and displacement.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68137-706-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.
The Top Chef host describes her journey to new heights.
For those who don’t know, Kish is a “gay Korean adopted woman, born in Seoul, raised in Michigan” and “a chef, a character, a host, and a cultural communicator—as well as a human being with a beating heart.” Though this book covers every step of her journey, every restaurant job and television role, and also discusses her experience as an adoptee (very positive) and a queer woman (late bloomer), the storytelling is so straightforward, lacking in suspense, character development, or dialogue, that it is basically a long version of its (longish) “About the Author.” Seemingly dramatic situations are not dramatized—when she was eliminated on her first Top Chef run, she assures us that she did the best she could, and drops it. “I can spare you the gory details (bouillabaisse and big personalities were involved).” Later, she cites a belief in protecting the privacy of others to omit the story of her first relationship with a woman. With no character development, neither does the reader get to know those who fall outside the privacy zone, like her best friend, Steph, and her wife, Bianca. When she gets mad, she says things like, “It’s a gross understatement to say I was crushed, beyond frustrated, and furious with the situation.” The fact that “I’ve never been a big reader” does not come as a surprise. It is more surprising when she confesses that “I believe the universe is selective about the moments in which it introduces life-changing prospects.”
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780316580915
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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