It doesn’t substitute for a true travel guide, but anyone who loved and misses Bourdain will want this book.
Posthumous selection of Bourdain’s thoughts on places exotic and well known, blended into a kind of Baedeker for the hipster set.
There’s Frankensteining at work here, with Woolever, who worked with Bourdain for nearly 10 years, surrounding his pithy excerpts with the kind of dryly useful information of a standard guidebook—e.g., “Buenos Aires is well served by bus routes, along with a seven-line underground metro system known as Subte, which links the downtown to the outer reaches of the city.” When Bourdain kicks in, it’s of a different order: “Argentina has the distinction of being home to more head-shrinkers per capita than anywhere else in the world….It’s an extraordinary thing, because in many cultures, to confess that you need to even confide in someone is seen as a sign of weakness. Here, everybody does it, and in no way frowns upon it.” That’s an interesting datum, the kind of thing you tuck away for future reference. Bourdain went to see one of those psychiatrists, confessing, “I feel like Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame—if he stayed in nice hotel suites with high-thread-count sheets.” Considering his sad end, the words are revealing. Where Bourdain traveled, drink and excessive eating were sure to follow. In Finland—a place full of people “tough enough to fight off Nazis and Russians”—he ate mystery meat that put “the self-loathing back into drinking” while in Hanoi, Vietnam, for which he had “a deep, abiding love,” he taught Barack Obama how to slurp noodles, with a belly-stuffing meal and beer running about $6: “I’m guessing the president doesn’t get a lot of state dinners like this.” Bourdain went nearly everywhere on the planet, eating and drinking prodigiously along the way. It makes for an exhilarating whirlwind tour, complete with charmingly impressionistic sketches by Allsbrook.
It doesn’t substitute for a true travel guide, but anyone who loved and misses Bourdain will want this book.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-280279-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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