A rigorous and sober assessment of a groundbreaking career.
Finding herself in the free world.
It wasn’t long ago that, in the eyes of many, the de facto leader of the Western world was—irony of ironies—a graduate of Karl Marx University. That institution has since reclaimed its original name, Leipzig University, and that leader is now retired. Angela Merkel has certainly earned the right to chronicle, over more than 700 incident-rich pages, her improbable journey from East German Ph.D. quantum chemist to Germany’s first female chancellor, a position she held from 2005 to 2021. The book’s title isn’t hyperbolic: Growing up in the spy-steeped German Democratic Republic, Merkel witnessed how her parents were “on thin ice,” forever wary of speaking their minds. The collapse of the GDR inspired Merkel, lighthearted and intellectually curious by nature, to use her new freedom. In 1989 she walked into a political party office and offered to help. “See those boxes back there?” she was told. “Could you unpack them?” From there it was a steady rise to the top, by way of the Bundestag (the parliament) and cabinet ministries. Merkel’s prose may be as graceful as her mother’s boxy and basic Trabant car, but her spare sentences have their own power, reflecting her rational approach to politics when, having to deal with the “self-righteousness” of Vladimir Putin and the selfishness of Donald Trump, she was the adult in the room. “Never explain, never complain,” she writes, citing the axiom linked to the British royal family. Merkel’s longtime adviser Beate Baumann helped write the memoir—the female partnership is itself rare—and the voice is confident but humble, and not without heart, as the author recounts a time of prosperity and tumult. The book is as no-nonsense, and often as comforting, as the sausages and potato salad that Merkel dined on to celebrate becoming chancellor—the same modest fare that she ate 16 years later to mark her retirement.
A rigorous and sober assessment of a groundbreaking career.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781250319906
Page Count: 720
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
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