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
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.
The accomplished British nature writer turns to issues of environmental ethics in his latest exploration of the world.
In 1971, a law instructor asked a musing-out-loud question: Do trees have legal standing? His answer was widely mocked at the time, but it has gained in force: As Macfarlane chronicles here, Indigenous groups around the world are pressing “an idea that changes the world—the idea that a river is alive.” In the first major section of the book, Macfarlane travels to the Ecuadorian rainforest, where a river flows straight through a belt of gold and other mineral deposits that are, of course, much desired; his company on a long slog through the woods is a brilliant mycologist whose research projects have led not just to the discovery of a mushroom species that “would have first flourished on the supercontinent [of Gondwana] that formed over half a billion years ago,” but also to her proposing that fungi be considered a kingdom on a footing with flora and fauna. Other formidable activists figure in his next travels, to the great rivers of northern India, where, against the odds, some courts have lately been given to “shift Indian law away from anthropocentrism and towards something like ecological jurisprudence, underpinned by social justice.” The best part of the book, for those who enjoy outdoor thrills and spills, is Macfarlane’s third campaign, this one following a river in eastern Canada that, as has already happened to so many waterways there, is threatened to be impounded for hydroelectric power and other extractive uses. In delightfully eccentric company, and guided by the wisdom of an Indigenous woman who advises him to ask the river just one question, Macfarlane travels through territory so rugged that “even the trout have portage trails,” returning with hard-won wisdom about our evanescence and, one hopes, a river’s permanence and power to shape our lives for the better.
Are rivers alive? Macfarlane delivers a lucid, memorable argument in the affirmative.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780393242133
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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