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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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