Review by Booklist Review
When Phillips, a jazzy John McPhee, ventures out into the world in pursuit of understanding of a place, mystery, vocation, or obsession, he is attention incarnate. The resulting prismatic descriptions power his vibrant, multidimensional essays, which are built on rich veins of research and further enlivened with crisply recounted conversations and convivially self-deprecating glimpses into his state of mind. Giddily unprepared, Phillips travels to Alaska to follow the Iditarod from a small plane. Although he feels overwhelmed in Tokyo, where his parents were married while his father was stationed there, he crafts an astute, many-faceted chronicle anchored to sumo wrestling and the writer Yukio Mishima's spectacular suicide in 1970. Phillips visits kitschy Roswell, New Mexico, and enigmatic Area 51, musing over the puzzles of reported UFO experiences while sharing his Spotify playlist as he drives on Route 66. He watches for tigers in India, observes the queen in London, and tells intricately affecting tales of his Oklahoma hometown, including a family tragedy and a scandal involving an oil fortune and a wildly inappropriate marriage. And, yes, there are owls.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former Grantland staff writer Phillips brings together entertaining, eclectic, and often insightful essays for a collection with room for considerations of both the datedness of sci-fi television and the ethical ambiguity of ecotourism. He often approaches topics from a pleasingly oblique angle, as when describing Queen Elizabeth II in "Once and Future Queen" through the people who serve and surround her, and the items she's known to carry in her handbag, including a "five-pound note, crisply folded, for the church collection plate. Sometimes ten pounds; never more." He also likes to play a central role in his own essays, an effective strategy for personal pieces, such as one about his hometown of Ponca City, Okla., "But Not Like Your Typical Love Story," but distracting in farther-flung pieces, such as one on the Iditarod, "Out in the Great Alone." Despite this misstep, Phillips's narrative voice is consistently appealing, and often laugh-out-loud funny ("The backyard was a jungle. I don't mean `We'll spend a weekend weeding and then plant some hydrangeas.' I mean there were creatures out there that had lairs"). At their best, Phillips's essays leave readers with newfound appreciation for subjects they may not have considered before, including sumo wrestling and Russia's greatest living animator. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
These eight essays are largely unrelated but cover a variety of interesting topics. Phillips details a trip to fly bush planes to cover the Iditarod, a Sumo wrestling tournament with a side trip to track down an aging Japanese revolutionary, the rise and fall of the founder of ConocoPhillips and his wife, who was also his adopted daughter, and more. The writing is clever and humorous, but there are moments when Phillips wants to make sure that the reader knows just how clever he is and slips into pretension. His perspective is heavily incorporated into his works, bringing a more personal feeling, but also leads to digressions that may or may not support his point. Despite the flaws, these essays are transporting and engrossing. Steve Menasche is a perfectly serviceable and pleasant reader, but he does fall down in a few respects. His voice suggests a significantly older person than the writer and that dissonance is accentuated because of the way the essays express the author's personality. The mispronunciation of certain foreign words may also break the flow for some listeners. Verdict Recommended for fans of NPR's Driveway Moments, short-form history, and highbrow periodicals. ["Phillips's essays are not only fascinating and thoroughly researched but written in a distinctive voice that conveys humor, awareness, and vulnerability": LJ 7/18 review of the Farrar hc.]-Tristan Boyd, Austin, TX © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Long-form narratives both diverting and engaging.In his debut collection, former Grantland and MTV News writer Phillips follows the familiar trajectory of the participatory journalist chasing down new angles on quirky subjects and subculturesspace invaders, sumo wrestlers, the Iditarod, tiger tourism in Indiabut his work stands out for its refreshing lack of memoir. On the whole, the author's eclectic travelogues and essays don't end up being journeys back to the author himself, though his keen sensitivities color each scene, and he rarely hides his feelings about the figures he meets. Phillips has fashioned a calling for himself as an American flneur, casting out into post-colonial frontiers and marveling at the oddities he encounters from the comfortable distance of unsupervised creative prose. His style blends free-form anecdotes with capsule histories and novellike passages that don't stop to sort out fact from perception or conjectures. Of his days among remote Alaskans, he writes, "it was such a warm place. I mean, fine, we're all jaded here, but you could feel it: this fragile human warmth surrounded by almost unmanageable sadness." Topics begin in earnest but drop away to follow alternate lines of inquiry. For example, a nerd's-eye view of UFO enthusiasm surrounding Area 51 leads to reveries on the PTSD of otherwise sane people who claim alien abduction, the derelict remains of Route 66, the genocide of Native Americans, and the mysteries of time as expressed in landscape. His biographical sketches of the British royal family speculate on their private conversations ("My dear, these people are beneath us," he imagines Prince Philip whispering to the queen), and he narrates the life of gifted Russian animator Yuri Norstein in the present-tense omniscience of a film script. Such stylistic pyrotechnics impress less, however, than the flecks of genuine insight the author dredges up from his experiences as well as the sense of a full human mind at large in the world that so many of his recollections approximate.Smooth and smart relief for the screen-weary. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
