Book Review

What first caught my eye about A. Kendra Greene’s No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity were those adjectives Strange and Wonderful. Juxtaposed beside two giraffes on the book’s cover, those big, bold words conjured up in me a specific type of essay collection, a collection that would feature quirky, rare animals, animals I never heard of before, animals from weird little pockets of the world I will never visit as long as I live. I imagined a collection that would reveal to me the bizarre and extraordinary phenomena I might stumble upon in nature if I were only lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, or perhaps unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But having now read the twenty-six essays collected here, I find myself instead drawn to those two initial words of the title: No Less. They have, of course, been there all along; yet perhaps too eager to see the strange, to see the wonderful, I overlooked what was right in front of my eyes. No less strange or wonderful—no less—as though someone had been describing those rare beasts I initially imagined, those unique spectacles, and then Greene steps in, says, “Hey, wait one minute. What about these? These things over here are no less strange, no less wonderful.” That is to say, my experience with the title is the same experience I had reading Greene’s essays. I entered thinking I understood what Greene would show me, thinking I understood these subjects well, but Greene’s words taught me to slow down, taught me to truly look at these subjects, to truly see what I initially neglected.

If you seek the type of essay collection I originally thought I held in my hands, you may find yourself disappointed. However, if you join Greene as she explores the strange and the wonderful in the mundane, in what we pass over in our daily lives, you may find yourself as I did, questioning if mundane is even the correct word for what goes on every day in our very presence. You will find that when finishing an essay, it is a near impossibility to predict what will come next. You will see animals such as dogs and cats, giant sloths and sharks, but also Scrooge from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Devil, and even Ted Cruz, the U.S. senator. And through Greene’s eyes—through her clever, imaginative descriptions and idiosyncratic insights—you will see the splendor, the magic, and, at times, the grotesquerie of these common subjects. And they are, indeed, no less strange or wonderful.

Yet, for all the creative and painterly descriptive passages of animals and characters—not to mention the beautiful illustrations Greene scatters throughout her prose—No Less Strange or Wonderful seems less concerned with those subjects. Often, what is being viewed (a dog, Scrooge, Ted Cruz) serves merely as the impetus for Greene’s analysis regarding how we use language to make sense of the world. Readers interested in plot and significant life events will find little of that here. This collection is interested in classification, in what someone says, the words we use to describe that which is being seen.

Take, for example, “Speaking of Basheis,” which begins with a dog Greene’s brother used to walk—“Chloe was a dog built like a coffee table. She was long and broad with diminutive little legs. Imagine a magnificent dog, the head and body as if rendered by one artist, the limbs by another. Imagine a claw-foot tub. Imagine a dog as if on cinder blocks, her proper legs stolen.” However, the essay quickly pivots, moving past that sweet, coffee-table-shaped doggo to explore how others view Chloe and how, by giving the dog a unique breed name, one’s interpretation of the dog changes. At first, other people are startled by the funny-looking canine. But once Chloe is jokingly labeled a basheis (a mix between a basset hound and a shar-pei), the dog no longer seemed funny. It was granted an air of elegance, of regality: “They loved our basheis. They asked if they could pet her. They scratched her ears and cupped her head in their hands and told her how beautiful she was.” Greene explores not a dog, but how language alters a person’s perception. To understand what we see, the language we use to describe, to label, is just as important as our eyes, if not more so. Simply put, we see with our words as much as we see with our eyes.

Whether it is the phrase “when Winston became a speck” or “I can feel your human fingers” or “Ted Cruz is a sentient bag of wasps” (all found in essays aptly named for the sentences spoken), the curiosity in the title No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity centers around how we think and how we speak. It is a curiosity in language, in what goes on inside of our heads, not what we see when we walk out our front door every morning. No Less Strange or Wonderful shows us that, to see the wonders of the world, we do not need to travel to those far-flung corners of our planet. We do not need to trek down the previously unseen. We merely need to open our eyes to what is around us and to open our ears to the ways in which we make sense of what we see.