A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.
A multiplicity of being.
The daughter of a Tunisian father and Québécoise mother, Abdelmoumen grew up in Montreal and lived in France between 2005 and 2017 before returning to Canada, where she has continued her career as a writer, scholar, and editor of a literary journal. In this insightful memoir, the first of her books to appear in English, Abdelmoumen reflects on race, ethnicity, cultural appropriation, and her own multiple identities. The relationship between James Baldwin and William Styron is central to these reflections: In France, reading Baldwin for the first time, she was surprised to discover that he and Styron had been lifelong friends. Styron, the grandson of slave owners, and Baldwin, the grandson of a slave, “were both consumed with the problem of racial inequality.” When Styron expressed interest in writing a novel about the rebel slave Nat Turner, Baldwin encouraged the project. The Confessions of Nat Turner won a Pulitzer Prize but incited fierce objections from some prominent Black writers. A white man, they claimed, could only promulgate “white southern myths, racial stereotypes, and literary clichés.” Baldwin disagreed, but he, too, later came under censure for not being “Black enough.” Abdelmoumen considers other efforts by white men to portray Black experience: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, Ron Stallworth’s Black Klansman, and Abel Meeropol’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit.” The idea of cultural appropriation, which has become an incendiary issue, seems to Abdelmoumen misguided. “Mistaking an ethnic checklist for a person’s identity is problematic,” she asserts, “as is the ensuing assumption that a person with a certain identity is necessarily knowledgeable about all related topics.” Diversity, she claims, should describe not minority status, but a society that acknowledges the complexity “that comes from all the different facets” of each person’s identity.
A thoughtful, timely contribution to a controversial debate.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781771966269
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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