Essential for country fans—a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love of music.
A Nashville-based songwriter and music publisher recounts an unlikely success story while celebrating the contributions of Black Americans to country music.
The winding stream that rolls below Clinch Mountain, where country music was supposedly born, surely lapped at the feet of one Eslie Riddle, a Black guitarist who likely taught Mother Maybelle Carter the “foundation of the Carter Family sound.” Everyone’s heard of Mother; no one’s heard of Riddle. It’s an erasure that troubles Randall, who argues with impeccable scholarship born of reading, close listening, and lived experience that country music is Black music, albeit with the “trace of Black folk whitewashed out of the rural South, the rural West, out of rural America on country radio and records.” Yet it’s there, and it won’t be silenced or denied. Randall is a firsthand witness to the struggle, the first Black woman to write a No. 1 country song, and she portrays forgotten and half-remembered greats such as Lil Hardin, Linda Martell, O.C. Smith, and Ray Charles (who may have made his bones as an R&B singer but also released a keystone album called Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music). Randall listens to country music with open, welcoming ears. In her canon, the Supremes fit into the Black country tradition, as do the Allman Brothers and John Prine. Steve Earle is a brother-in-arms; so is Quincy Jones, about whom the author delivers an entertaining tale of home invasion that fortunately turned out well. (“Quincy,” she writes, “is a whole lot more Black Country and Black Country–adjacent than most folks realize.”) Occasionally tart but more often both forgiving and patiently instructive, Randall tallies the debt that all country music owes to so many Black artists over the centuries.
Essential for country fans—a delightful, inspirational story of persistence, resistance, and sheer love of music.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668018408
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Black Privilege Publishing/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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