RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThree reasons you should read Susan Orlean’s On Animals even if, like me, you are a faithful subscriber to The New Yorker and eagerly consumed nearly all of the essays when they first appeared during the more than 25 years this collection spans: (1) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (2) Every essay in the book is magnificent. (3) Every essay in the book is magnificent ... Anyway, be honest: Your memory is not what it used to be (mine isn’t, at least) and revisiting these essays is like reading them anew. That’s not only because of the collision between memory and time. One of the delights of On Animals is the way it is so carefully arranged. This elegant curation makes one essay lead to another through manifold connections, some so tiny as to be almost subliminal, some functioning as updates across time, and all working in concert to convey ideas that no one essay could manage on its own ... Orlean’s way with a simile is unmatched in the English-speaking world ... Clearly, the essay collection as a genre holds no danger for Orlean, who has never written a skippable word in her life ... Part of what makes this book so immensely readable is the coupling of a brilliant essayist’s friendly, funny voice with a committed generalist’s all-embracing curiosity. There appears to be nothing in the world that doesn’t interest Orlean, and she has such a companionable way of conveying her fascinations that readers can’t help being fascinated too ... Each animal’s turn in the warm spotlight of Orlean’s gaze gives readers a chance to learn something enthralling about even the most ordinary of creatures ... time marches on, and leaving a tale in medias res, as reported essays inevitably do, is of little consequence when the tale itself is mesmerizing, and when the teller’s way with words is half the appeal ... It’s no surprise that a writer whose mind throws out similes like favors from a Mardi Gras parade is a writer who sees crucial connections between animals and people. This emphasis on interconnectedness emerges not just from one essay after another but also from the cumulative effect of the collection as a whole. Even more than the linguistic pyrotechnics, the friendly wit or the mesmerizing storytelling, that’s the true gift of On Animals. ... For though Orlean does not overtly wade into the thorn field of animal-rights debates, and though many of these essays predate a widespread public recognition of the escalating dangers of climate change and diminishing global biodiversity, what she understands about the human-animal relationship is fundamental to addressing both of those calamities: the fact that we belong to one another. Indeed, there is no human-animal relationship, for we are all animals, and what happens to the least among us on this crowded planet happens to us all.
Brian Doyle
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle’s posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double-underlining other sentences; by sometimes shading in the space between the two sets of lines so as to create a kind of D.I.Y. bolded font; by marking whole astonishing paragraphs with a squiggly line in the margin, and by highlighting many of those squiggle-marked sections with a star to identify the best of the astonishing lines therein ... This book is what Van Zandt’s greatest hits would look like had he lived to be 60, and if every song on the record hit the bar set by Pancho and Lefty ... God’s acolyte is Doyle himself, missing not a single gorgeous blessing in a life so full of love it spilled over into essay after essay after essay ... Doyle was also both hilarious and fierce, and I took as much pleasure from watching him address a denizen of the gun-rights coalition as \'dear outraged shrieking lunatic,\' as I took from lingering over the loveliest descriptions of the natural world I have ever read ... arguably a two-page master class in environmental writing. It also offers a fit description of the experience of reading this remarkable book: \'a feeling eerily like a warm hand brushed against your cheek, and you sit there, near tears, smiling, and then you stand up. Changed.\'
