Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds.
A meditation on freedom and confinement and the creative tension between the two.
Maclear (Julia Child, 2014, etc.) has written books for children and adults and some that blur the distinction with appeal for both, but she has never written a book quite like this. Also, few other books on birding are anything like this, for her “observation” is mainly restricted to urban Toronto, where the kinds of birds she sees aren’t likely to be exotic. What grabs and holds readers’ attention is the author’s own attention, as she describes in detail what she is seeing, how she is feeling, and how her perception and perspective are both shifting, however subtly. She began her unlikely bird year during “the winter I found myself with a broken part. I didn’t know what it was that was broken, only that whatever widget had previously kept me on plan, running fluidly along, no longer worked as it should….I had lost the beat.” Her father was ailing, her work was faltering, and, in what she calls her “roomy marriage,” she needed to explore something outside. “In my husband’s presence,” she writes, “I have felt my solitude dissolve, but I have also felt lonelier than the moon; such are the contradictions of intimacy.” The simple precision of Maclear’s prose belies the depth, as if the book were the tip of the iceberg and what she has elided or omitted constitutes the rest. She attached herself to a birding musician as a guide (her husband is also a musician; neither is named in the text), and it was through what she experienced with him that she discovered new ways of seeing and being. “The birds tell me not to worry, that the worries that sometimes overwhelm me are little in the grand scheme of things,” she discovered. By this point, she had outgrown the need for a guide.
Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5420-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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