From Publishers Weekly
The author of
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and
Still Life with Woodpecker has regularly published shorter pieces in
Esquire,
Playboy, the
New York Times and elsewhere. The whimsical, quixotic nature of that work comes through in this hit-and-miss affair—one that remains woefully short on fiction, focusing mostly on the author's travel writing, essays, celebrity profiles and poetry. The best travel piece, "The Day the Earth Spit Wart Hogs," finds Robbins traversing a big game park in Tanzania. His commentary on the '60s, the legacy of burger mogul Ray Kroc and the prose of Thomas Pynchon remains trenchant and provocative; other pieces are dated to the point of irrelevance (his foreword to Terrance McKenna's 1992
The Archaic Revival). As a poet, Robbins is obvious and heavy-handed, but occasionally he hits the kind of mystical note that characterizes "Catch 28" and makes his florid imagery work. The fiction is brief and mostly forgettable. But an essay called "In Defiance of Gravity" starts as a riff on an obscure club and winds up being an ode to the combination of unconventionality and humor that define Robbins's career as a writer.
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Robbins' belief in the power of "defiant humor," exuberant love of language, and playful Zen perspective are key elements in his zestfully comic and cosmic novels, including his most recent,
Villa Incognito (2003). It is, therefore, a great pleasure to find this psychedelic son of Mark Twain, this metaphor-slinging, myth-steeped champion of liberation directly addressing his aesthetic and spiritual concerns in this retrospective collection of essays, poetry, and short stories. Robbins' funny and astute short works shimmer with original and piquant descriptions, sensual delight, and a firm grasp of human nature and history. He displays his critical chops in an incandescent review of a 1967 Doors concert, and a richly argued recent essay in praise of "crazy wisdom." He marvels at nature in a vivid account of a journey to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, offers resonant tributes to Joseph Campbell and Terence Mc-Kenna, and states his writer's credo: "We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain"--a mission he fulfills with verve.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
by Tom Robbins
by Tom Robbins
by Tom Robbins
by Tom Robbins
by Tom Robbins
