Impossible Owls

July 1, 2018

This eclectic collection of essays from journalist Phillips combines in-depth reporting with personal histories to explore broadly the contemporary human condition. As the author chases tigers in India, follows the Iditarod in Alaska, watches sumo wrestlers in Japan, and drives to Area 51, his fascination with things loosely defined as the fringe is often set in contrast with his role as an outsider. In personal essays and character profiles of animator Yuri Norstein, socialite Lydie Marland, and members of the British royal family, Phillips showcases a penchant for subtlety highlighting individual eccentricities within their respectively distinct historical contexts. Common themes throughout touch on aspects of everyday life, such as self-exploration, a sense of belonging or lack thereof, and the amorphous borders between modern dualisms. The subjects have broad appeal and would be enjoyed by anyone interested in New Journalism as a literary genre. VERDICT Phillips's essays are not only fascinating and thoroughly researched but written in a distinctive voice that conveys humor, awareness, and vulnerability.--Matt Gallagher, Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 7, 2018
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.

Starred review from July 1, 2018
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 subcultures--space invaders, sumo wrestlers, the Iditarod, tiger tourism in India--but 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 fl�neur, 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.

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September 15, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)