A great nature writer cleans out his desk.
A collection of National Geographic articles from the veteran science writer.
Quammen, the award-winning author of Breathless, Spillover, and The Song of the Dodo, has long worked for the iconic magazine, and most of the pieces have been slightly updated. Some readers may be surprised to learn that huge areas of the planet exist where no man has set foot, and there are plenty of blank spots in our knowledge of life, humans included. The author chronicles the story of Mike Fay, a quasi-Victorian “half-crazed white man” explorer in the tradition of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley who walked more than 2,000 miles through the last great remaining forests of Central Africa to survey its biological diversity. Three long articles describe the 15-month expedition, which resulted in no deaths but a few near misses. Tales of Africa occupy most of the chapters, although there is a compelling story from Chile and Argentina, where a wealthy American couple has persuaded the governments to form national parks including much land they have bought. Two chapters detour to Kamchatka in Russia’s far east, a sparsely populated wonderland of volcanoes, geysers, wildlife, and salmon-rich streams and a reminder that the Soviet Union’s fall was an ecological disaster, as its government abandoned nature reserves to rapacious entrepreneurs and poachers. Quammen strains to remain optimistic on the subject of conservation and sometimes succeeds, but the future looks uncertain. It’s mostly money from richer nations that supports conservation in poor nations, but much must be spent to provide their citizens jobs, education, and infrastructure. National Geographic is famous for maps and brilliant photographs that accompany the articles. Sadly, there are none in this collection, and readers may struggle to follow some narratives because Quammen often writes about villages and other geographical features too obscure to turn up in internet searches.
A great nature writer cleans out his desk.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781426222078
Page Count: 352
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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