A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.
A political, personal, and immensely readable collection about the intermingling of fantasy and reality.
With brilliant insight and masterful writing, Villarreal examines fantasy at close range, blending personal essay with intellectual criticism. The author ranges widely, examining racism, her childhood as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, the gender performances of Kurt Cobain and Selena, and the fraught circumstances of her divorce. At the heart of the narrative is a significant question: “What does the constant state of loss after colonization, enslavement, and dispossession do to the collective imagination?” Furthermore, who has the privilege of imagination, and how does that shape our collective reality? In this memorable narrative, fantasy is involved in many different things: the video game where becoming a witcher is a means to heal after the betrayal of divorce; the Sphinx Gate in The Neverending Story; the American dream, “a fairy tale, after all”; Villareal’s search for her grandmother’s records, lost from national archives due to gendered violence; movies in which an all-white cast is still the norm; the author’s own mental health struggles; and Latine writers being forced to carry the label “magical realism” no matter their genre. Where there is fantasy, there is also magic, and the magic of this collection is the elasticity and brilliance with which Villarreal is able to take critical analysis and connect it to her own experiences. Magic itself, as the author indicates, is often treated as “a feminized, infantilized, racialized practice done by primitive or unwell people, despite its history in the healing arts. Ancestral knowledge is reduced to ‘magic’ to strip it of legitimacy, shamed, ridiculed, or framed as dangerous because it is how disempowered people…have historically healed, rebelled, and reclaimed their narratives.” Villareal expertly reclaims those narratives here.
A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593187142
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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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
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SEEN & HEARD
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