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SEEK AND HIDE

Name: SEEK AND HIDE
Author: Amy Gajda
ISBN: 978-1-984880-74-1

THE TANGLED HISTORY OF THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY

by Amy Gajda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2022

Educative reading for lawyers, journalists, and others who must balance the right to make known with the right to conceal.

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The right to privacy is not a given, as this complicated legal history makes clear.

As law professor Gajda writes, there has been tension between the right to privacy and the right of the free press to publish news since the Colonial era. Nonetheless, the modern period of privacy law begins, by her account, with a specific incident in the late 19th century when a risqué dancer contested the publication of a photograph of her onstage act. The event coincided with the publication of an article by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose firm did so brisk a business in privacy-related lawsuits that he felt comfortable turning down one such action by none other than Mark Twain. “The U.S. Supreme Court has never decided precisely when the right to privacy trumps a freedom to publish a truth,” writes Gajda. Instead, the court has referred the matter to the states, which has resulted in a patchwork of laws that serve to highlight the tension even further: “Society needs [privacy], the law is there on which to build, and the only question is, which way do we as a society want to go, especially when the right to privacy is so often pitted against that other critical right, the freedom of expression?” Just as with the Supreme Court, American society seems torn, and the legal pendulum swings, sometimes weighing heavily in favor of the press (as with, for instance, the publication of the Pentagon Papers) and sometimes siding, by omission or commission, with those who claim the right to privacy—Donald Trump and his taxes, to name just one of the author’s examples. Clearly, she concludes, the matter is legislative as much as judicial, such that Congress must weigh in on what constitutes, as one Supreme Court decision framed it, “a subject of legitimate news interest.”

Educative reading for lawyers, journalists, and others who must balance the right to make known with the right to conceal.

Pub Date: April 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-984880-74-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022

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HOSTAGE

by Eli Sharabi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2025

A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.

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Enduring the unthinkable.

This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.

A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.

Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025

ISBN: 9780063489790

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025

Categories:

ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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DEAR NEW YORK

by Brandon Stanton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2025

A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.

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Portraits in a post-pandemic world.

After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.

A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.