Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.
A provocative memoir of personal essays exploring race, identity, and queer love.
In his debut essay collection, first-generation Chinese American writer Dai crafts an intricate tapestry of memory and reflection through lush, impressionistic prose. The book ambitiously explores themes of identity, race, language, love, and queerness, framed by Dai’s travels across the U.S.—from Tennessee to Arizona—and back to his ancestral homeland in China. Dai’s exploration of identity begins poignantly with his name—Thomas versus Nuocheng—offering a compelling entry point: “Thomas gets me through the roll call quicker….It is the name on my driver’s license and passport, a word whose primary synonym in my head is me.” What follows is stylistically profound yet often veers into self-conscious territory. The narrative is peppered with references to influential thinkers like Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, and Vladimir Nabokov, suggesting Dai’s thoughts are filtered through their sensibilities. He reflects, “For so long, I have thought about love as a feeling that lives and dies in the moment. I have thought about love through the words of philosophers like Barthes and Badiou rather than poets like Audre Lorde—Lorde, who writes, breathlessly describing a lover’s touch, ‘I am come home.’” This intellectual approach sometimes results in opaque descriptions, particularly when describing relationships with family and lovers—two of whom are referred to simply as “J” or “you.” Stark black-and-white photos attempt to enhance his written impressions but add to the book’s somewhat elusive quality. Dai’s prose oscillates between clarity and dense, stylized writing. At its best, it offers insightful reflections on the immigrant experience and queer identity. However, the weight of its intellectual indulgences sometimes threatens to overshadow the personal narrative. The work will likely resonate with readers drawn to lush prose and literary experimentation, but it may leave others yearning for more grounded, accessible storytelling.
Despite occasional opacity, this noteworthy debut showcases a unique voice in contemporary memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781324066378
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
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
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