Professor Kathy J Phillips

The Impossibly Thin Legs of My Racing Camels Professor Kathy J Phillips

This creative nonfiction book is a collage, where the two main "colors" are Bones and Camels. Camels have impossibly thin legs, but they're fine with the camels. I have "odd bones," a congenital deformity, but these bones are fine with me too. Other people, though, have brought some rather odd (and humorous) frames for the bones: religious, medical, sociological, psychological. In addition to this bit of autobiographical telling, the book offers the bigger wonder of bones and camels, drawn from research in science, art, history, and wars. Recurrent tags head the many short chapters. The entries headed "How to Pack Your Camel," "How to Sing to Your Camel," and so on, will give you precise, surprising information that a cameleer could tell you; at the same time, they explain, with a lot of wit, "how to" write a book, or how to read this book. The ten entries for "Political Camel" connect T. E. Lawrence's World War I camel-corps to our present-day wars in the Middle East. The many "Ink Art" chapters riff on Zen drawings of offhand skulls, or of Zen buddies gabbing and laughing, even with some unusually animated skeletons. All the intermittent tags come together through a theme of reaching out: from forging links with friends, to developing responsibility for a larger community. Library Journal included my previous creative nonfiction book in their "Best Books of 2008": "Like most really fine books, Phillips's Moon in the Water (Vanderbilt UP) almost defies description--it is at once a memoir, a meditation on parenting a parent, art history, comedy . . . By turns witty, compassionate, wise" (19 May 2008, Dec. 2008). The humor and the wonderment in that book also occur in Camels.