A spirited look at life inside Père-Lachaise, as told by its philosophical and funny curator.
Right at home in the cemetery.
One of the benefits of living in a cemetery is that your deceased neighbors don’t complain about how noisy you and your family are—especially when you’re throwing a party. So observes Gallot in this delightful and thoughtful book about his experiences as the curator of Paris’ Père-Lachaise Cemetery, likely the world’s most beloved burial ground. Gallot became something of a sensation in France when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, he spotted a rare fox cub at the cemetery; the photos he took of the animal went viral. The book includes many of Gallot’s handsome images of the garden cemetery: cute felines (he calls them “tombcats”), birds, weasellike stone martens, and the ornate and weathered headstones and chapels that, nestled amid trees and rambling ivy, help make the place popular. Of course, the famous residents are also a draw. Within Père-Lachaise’s 110 acres are the remains of Frédéric Chopin, Isadora Duncan, Édith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Richard Wright, and Oscar Wilde. And, yes, Jim Morrison. His grave, fenced off to curb idolizers’ graffiti, attracts the most visitors. Gallot, in his 40s, prefers Morrissey’s music; he wanders the cemetery wondering about the dead, much as two friends do in the Smiths’ song “Cemetery Gates”: “So we go inside / And we gravely read the stones / All those people, all those lives, / Where are they now?” Gallot is the son of memorial stonemasons. He didn’t think he’d be working in the same field, but he seems perfect for the job of managing a cemetery that holds roughly 1.3 million souls (and not just because his birthday is Halloween): He has a healthy respect for the dead, and he values the importance of “accompanying the living,” as he says of the grieving. He’s also justifiably proud of eliminating pesticides in the cemetery, which means wildflowers now bloom everywhere. In this place of death, life flourishes.
A spirited look at life inside Père-Lachaise, as told by its philosophical and funny curator.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781778401589
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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