A sweet and pretty straightforward wordless picture book by Rina Singh and digitally illusrated by Nathalie Dion. A solo bird comes into a city looki A sweet and pretty straightforward wordless picture book by Rina Singh and digitally illusrated by Nathalie Dion. A solo bird comes into a city looking to make a nest and chooses a tree near an apartment building. Each inhabitant becomes intrigued and then very interested in the bird. I think this is a nudge for us to all make connections with the natural world, and birds in particular. Later in thebook we see other birds flying in, so it's not just one bird, finally, it's a whole flock, a whole natural world. Sweet and simple.
PS: Apropos of nothing, I was reminded of Hitchcock's Rear Windowm where the Jimmy Stewart character snoops on his neighbors, seeing into each apartment. This is kind of an inversion--not the human world, but the natureal world--become a birder!--and here the people in the apartment look at the bird. I know, it has nothing to do with this book, but take it as a positive spin on Hitchcock's (Cornell Woolrich's) voyeur/murder thriller. Once, a Bird is, let's say, quieter? ...more
Grandpa and the Kingfisher is author Anna Wilson’s sweet and gentle tribute to her father, whose favorite bird was the kingfisher. In this fictional pGrandpa and the Kingfisher is author Anna Wilson’s sweet and gentle tribute to her father, whose favorite bird was the kingfisher. In this fictional picture book story, Grandpa teaches his grandkid about the cycle of life through their observations of the kingfishers, and the food chain, mayflies, dragonflies, mating, raising chicks, and death, even as grandpa gets older and frailer. So it’s honest about life and death, following grandpa’s observation that nobody lives forever, as the kingfishers disappear.
I had just been researching kingfishers as I saw one the other day at a bird sanctuary, so I went back to my source to confirm that they live longer than Wilson implies (then see other reviewers also mention this in their reviews). The death of grandpa is, like the kingfishers, a sudden, abrupt, and unexplained disappearance, which will be confusing without an adult reader to explain it (you can download an audio version from the provided QR code, but I’d still suggest reading it aloud to a child).
But the idea of nature going on forever is positive, even if it is also true that we are losing species every day. But the point is to learn about and live in harmony with the natural world. I liked Sarah Massini’s illustrations a lot, especially the closely detailed and dramatic scenes of the kingfisher diving for fish. ...more
Just a note to self. In my experience families go through these obsessions--ping pong tournaments, chess, particular sports, and so on, and this is trJust a note to self. In my experience families go through these obsessions--ping pong tournaments, chess, particular sports, and so on, and this is true for mine, too. We all got into somewhat more serious birding lately, though the Cornell Bird App, and so suddenly all these bird books like this show up strewn around the house. This one is cool. I would have liked it at 7 or 17 or (now) 70, as the pics the team chose for all the weird birds are fantastic. Extraordinary and bizarre, yep.
It's one of those Guinness Book of World Records books, in a way: Longest Legs, Widest Wingspan, Smelliest, Longest penis (true! Lake Duck in South America, cuz you wanted to know, admit it), biggest, smallest, most voracious appetite, produces the most eggs, and so on. ...more
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet is nice, almost a kind of allegory of goodness in the face of tragedy. However, I had the feeling that Millet fell in love wDinosaurs by Lydia Millet is nice, almost a kind of allegory of goodness in the face of tragedy. However, I had the feeling that Millet fell in love with her Good main character Gil in the process of her writing this He’s almost totally good throughout. He’s the heir to oil and gas riches when his exec parents both die in a car crash when he’s a kid. He meets a woman at 18 who after many years dumps him: “I met someone,” is all she has to say to him; she married Gil for his money, and Gil was naive to think it had been love.
Gil’s a kind of loner, who instead of doing paid work, possibly redeems the damage his parents and their generation has done to the planet by volunteering to Do Good everywhere. And love birds, going extinct at a rapid rate due to climate change.. But when he is dumped he leaves Manhattan, buys a house in Tucson (increasingly hot Arizona being a kind of site for considering climate change, I think), and connects with a family there. He faces down bullies and bird-killers. There’s a lot of time spent in the book about infidelity and the rising divorce rate, and the struggle to commitment as yet another indication of moral decline.
I was reminded when I read it of the feel of moral allegory in John Steinbeck’s Winter of Our Discontent, where a lost guy finds his way. Gil is kinda too perfect but Millet’s book about the present day in Arizona, with all the hate and separation as climate destruction ensues, feels like her winter of discontent book. The point of the dinosaurs re: humans I don’t think I have to underscore. The connection of the extinction of birds to the survival of the planet is just for her that we have to take care of each other--humans have to work against bird and animal extinction as part of working against human extinction. We have to connect with each other, be kinder. Not a complex book, but life-affirming:
“. . . separateness had always been the illusion . . . the world was inside you.”...more
Since I was traveling to northern Wisconsin to stay for the weekend on a small lake (with loons), I picked this up just as I was leaving the library, and it did not disappoint. Sweet story, educational book for young'uns, lovely illustrations, kind of a throw-back style, delicate lines....more
I am a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor, one of the very best short story writers of all time. She was devoutly Roman Catholic, which she connected to thI am a huge fan of Flannery O'Connor, one of the very best short story writers of all time. She was devoutly Roman Catholic, which she connected to the southern grotesque literary tradition. Some people who have no religious background find her stories bizarrely Christian, which they are! But to me --one raised in a strict religious (Dutch Protestant) environment, they are not only not off-puttingly strange, but strangely thrilling. Many of her stories also feature birds--ducks, guinea hens, though particularly chickens and peacocks.
Last year I found a book of cartoons O'Connor had done throughout her short life (she died of Lupus at 39), and in this book we learn more about her drawing at an early age birds of all kinds. She especially loved peacocks and raised them on her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.
She "knew that the peacock had been the bird of Hera, the wife of Zeus, but since that time it had probably come down in the world.”
“Whut is that thang?” one of the boys asked. “Churren,” the old man said, “that’s the king of the birds!”
The priest calls the peacock a “beauti-ful” bird with a “tail full of suns."
In "The Displaced Person" O’Connor underscores a woman’s blindness to the bird by describing how the peacock “jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun. . . She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn’t notice it any more than she did the. . . sky." O'Connor thought that the second coming of Christ would be like the peacock in full glory.
Mathematician Amy Alznauer wrote the story here, which I especially love when she quotes O'Connor:
When her beloved Dad died of Lupus, she wrote, "death wakes you up, like a wound in the side" (--that bizarre way grief can lead to wonder).
But the illustration from Ping Zhu--her first book???!!--is just wonderful. The book is said to be for children 4-8, but it is clearly all ages, because no child that age would read her stories or know about her.
It's spring! Time to look for birds. And this is a good and lovely introduction written by Jennifer Ward and illustrated beautifully by Diana Sudyka tIt's spring! Time to look for birds. And this is a good and lovely introduction written by Jennifer Ward and illustrated beautifully by Diana Sudyka to birding (maybe primarily) for kids, featuring more than 50 illustrations of birds, and some simple advice: How to find birds? Look up, or down, look closely at where birds blend in with natural foliage. Close your eyes and listen. Move slowly,. be quiet. Feed them. Maybe they will find you.
Two weekends ago I spent time in a cabin near a lake, with family, a camera, binoculars, 5 hours south of where I live, looking for animals and birds in the woods.
Last week I walked with one son as I have for many ears through the Montrose Beach bird sanctuary on Lake Michigan.
Yesterday I stopped short less than thirty feet from a hawk on the edge of a pond.
I saw this book as sixth place in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award humor category so thought I would order it from the library. I thought the title wasI saw this book as sixth place in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award humor category so thought I would order it from the library. I thought the title was pretty funny, and I thought the juvenile humor might just appeal to some of the actual juveniles in this house, but I didn't share it with them because the main comedic strategy is to use Marine-level swearing (cf, that picture book for adults, Go the F... to Sleep) such as replacing Red-Breasted Sapsucker with Red-breasted Shitsucker, and so on. The juvenile humor is mildly funny, I guess: Belted King-Pisser instead of Kingfisher, or Dumb Western Bluebird instead of Western Bluebird, so the point of the joke is to make the author actually appear dumb. Self-parody.
"He draws pretty well for being so dumb! Matt Kracht? Nope, Matt Crocked, haw haw haw haw haw! Put that in your nest and suck an egg, Matt Crap!"--From the boid Crap calls Red-winged Butt-Wad! "Pretty funny, Not! That's Red-Winged Blackbird to you, wise guy! Don't give up your day job!"...more
For Birds' Sake is a collaboration between Cemre Yesil and Maria Sturm and is dedicated to the Birdme“I know why the caged bird sings”-- Maya Angelou.
For Birds' Sake is a collaboration between Cemre Yesil and Maria Sturm and is dedicated to the Birdmen of Istanbul. I can’t quite elevate my status to birder, but I do go every week or so to the Montrose Beach Bird Sanctuary on Lake Michigan with my son S, who loves to walk there, and another son, H, who just may become a birder. We feed birds in our back yard, and keep a “bird book” documenting all the birds that we see coming into the yard. And sometimes we photograph them if we can, some of them gold and purple finches, a rare woodpecker or kestrel, but this is a large urban area, and I have a small back yard, so the extent of my birding is pretty limited, really. And I knew nothing about these birdmen, but I got this book as a gift recently. Then discovered several complicating aspects of their work. I’ll explain.
Here’s a website where you can see the men, some aspects of their work, but you don’t actually see the birds. The bird(men) and the photographers (women) listen to the birds, mainly!
The photography work here is documentation of a dying practice in Istanbul, the breeding and care of particular birds, in this case local finch varieties, the men, mostly older, carrying the birds everywhere in shrouded white cages, the confinement increasing, they claim, the beauty of the birds' singing. In the book you mainly have the photographs, for which I am grateful, but the above website tells you a bit more about the birdmen.
The truly baffling aspect of this practice is the darkness, keeping the birds in the dark. It’s an illegal practice, actually, with some hint of cruelty to it, many people say, so there are people who are trying to free the birds, driving the practice underground. The men otherwise seem to lovingly feed and care for their birds, they say the covered boxes protect the fragile birds from the world, and then, they also participate in singing “contests.” Much of the practice seems isolated, but there is a social dimension.
For these men—and they are all men—keeping birds and listening to their singing is a sort of addiction that they think they cannot live without. As one man says, “I won't go out with my wife, it's my bird I want to be seen with,” one of them says, before turning to the cage, his words quickly fading into a beautiful whistled language that only his winged pet will understand.
This is photography as cultural anthropology, an interesting project that leaves me with more questions than answers. A cool and weird book, but you don't get much of a sense of the cultural practice from just looking at the photographs, thus the 3 stars for the book from me.
The Birdman of Alcatraz trailer, with Burt Lancaster as Robert Stroud, a film based on the story of a lifer who taught himself the science of ornithology, though he was in solitary confinement for an incredible 43 years:
You look like a monster, one woman said to another. The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws twisted into a wall. OnFirst Thing Tyler Mills
You look like a monster, one woman said to another. The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering their faces to the grass, as though an exercise can will an effect. People made their way to the hospital: a doctor would look at them, and then they could die. You can dip a line of monofilament into a river. You can do it twice. The first becomes a second. The second becomes a third. Three girls stretched out their arms while the wind sheared their flesh. Sheared, not seared, what was left. I could have shown you a swimming pool lit with turquoise light. It was early. It was a mission. It wasn’t the first.
Hawk Parable is a book of poetry by Tyler Mills, whose first book was the also wonderful Tongue Lyre. As of today, it is my favorite book so far this year. Among many other related issues, it is about the ever present capacity for human beings to engage in their own devastation through nuclear and atomic warfare. Mills’s own grandfather was a WWII fighter pilot and may have been involved in testing/bombing, so this was part of the impetus for the book. She doesn’t know for sure, but this very “not knowing” is one of the mysteries she investigates.
Another, related subject is how we can best represent our memories, history, experience, as each year the experience is another year older and dimmer, faded into the distance, getting somewhat obscure. But now that you know that the poem above is about Nagasaki, see if it doesn’t make a bit more sense; but not completely comprehensible, right? To even suggest something so horrific could be clearly narrated is almost an ethical issue.
What’s the relationship between memory and imagination? Of secret history and our capacity for evil? What is the best way to “capture” something beyond our ability to put something in words? Is poetry after the Holocaust or Hiroshima even possible, as Adorno asked? “We don’t have imagery,” Mills says at one point. Or why is it the imagery we use often falls short? Why, for instance, do we call it a “mushroom cloud”? Why was the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima called Little Boy? How is this an unacceptable softening of the horror? How many children alone were incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Answer: It is impossible to fix exact figures, but experts insist that a quarter million is a conservative number).
“Two sheets of archival paper, one for truth, the other, lie.”
Shakespeare liked the sonnet for the subject of love. What is the best form for war, for nuclear murder, for unspeakable suffering? Let me count some of the ways Mills uses to try to get at some of these horrific mysteries: lyric, narrative, found, “experimental,” (which tend to be more fragmented, pastiche; I think of Paul Celan’s fragmented poetry after the Holocaust, compared to his more conventional work before the war(. Mills' sources included faded photographs, her grandfather’s writing, her dreams, declassified government files, John Hershey’s Hiroshima, the testimonies of survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Some repeated images/themes: Flight (birds, planes); (nature, technology); the fragility of the body; shadows/the sun as illumination/blinding; our individual/collective responsibility for mass murder.
Mills lives and teaches now in New Mexico, near enough to Los Alamos, where so much testing took place. She’s researched the extensive testing there, and also on Bikini Atoll, and other isolated, "hidden" or not quite secret places where nuclear testing has taken place. History fades into the shadows; how do we remember what we don’t fully comprehend? Underground testing; nuclear waste buried in the ground, out of sight, out of mind. Some of these poems are “clear” and personal and some of it is dream-infused, dream-like, disoriented. Some of it is searingly direct, and some of it is difficult, complex. Trying to find the words where there are no words. Brave, terrifying. But make no mistake about it: This is gorgeous, humane, important work, absolutely astonishing work.
One small and "simple" “found” poem taken from actual survivor testimony:
The Baby
I was hanging the baby’s diapers on the balcony When I noticed A multicolored parachute Floating in the sky.
Another survivor writes: “It is impossible for me to write anymore. Forgive me.”
Four more of the poems from this collection can be found here:
Here is an essay that can be found at the Poetry Foundation site about her research into nuclear testing/detonation/devastation that explains the Punch Cards work:
Simon is a third generation bookstore owner with a lot of baggage. His story is related by Aimee DeJongh, in her first graphic novel. He feels a lot oSimon is a third generation bookstore owner with a lot of baggage. His story is related by Aimee DeJongh, in her first graphic novel. He feels a lot of guilt for not speaking out enough for his best friend, Ralf, who was being bullied when he was in primary school; he feels guilty for not intervening as he watches a woman commit suicide. He feels weighed down as his bookstore fails; his wife wants him to sell to the bookstore chain; the offer is good, but he feels he owes his Dad not to sell to them. When he was in school he wanted to be an ornithologist, but he gave up what he really wanted to do to follow his Dad’s wishes. This is one anguished, tormented dude, with anger issues.
At one point he meets a young college woman who wants to read books on magical realism. She tries to help him face all his demons. It gets complicated, but finally, he sort of does.
And then there are these honey buzzards, and. . . magical realism in the story.
The story is about guilt and trauma and healing, elegantly told. I like the black and white drawing very well. Several wordless contemplative pages. Touches of Craig Thompson style, the use of white space, the strong composition, the deft images. Birds! I like the artwork more than the story, I think. Look forward to seeing more from her in the future. ...more
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