A well-written, profoundly empathetic memoir from an entrepreneur with a very bright future.
An award-winning Black designer, entrepreneur, and activist reflects on her past accomplishments and future ambitions.
James has found success in a variety of ways: designer of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s iconic “Tax the Rich” dress for the 2021 Met Gala; founder of the Fifteen Percent Pledge, an organization that calls on corporations to donate 15% of their “shelf space” to Black-owned businesses; and winner of the Council of Fashion Designers of America/Vogue Fashion Fund Award for her company, Brother Vellies. In her debut memoir, the author chronicles her happy childhood growing up with her Ghanaian father and ethnically ambiguous mother, who was “adopted as an infant and never knew anything about her biological parents.” During her early years, James thrived under her grandmother’s loving care, but then her mother married a physically abusive man who also sexually assaulted James. “I did not tell my mother what he had done to me at that time because I already knew that she was battling for her life,” writes the author. While both women eventually escaped the abuse, the marriage significantly damaged James’ relationship with her mother. At the same time, it “allowed me to believe that I could forge my own path.” Traveling to Africa, she learned how to make shoes at workshops in places like Namibia, South Africa, and Kenya and how to combine her creativity and fashion sense to found her company. Ultimately, the author’s world travels and keen sense of justice led her to not only business success, but also social justice activism, which has informed her production models and her philanthropic involvement with Black Lives Matter and other movements. Throughout the text, James is vulnerable and frank, cultivating a narrative voice that is both intimate and captivating; on the line level, her language is impressively lyrical.
A well-written, profoundly empathetic memoir from an entrepreneur with a very bright future.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239452
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.
Smith returns with a photo-heavy book of days, celebrating births, deaths, and the quotidian, all anchored by her distinctive style.
In 2018, the musician and National Book Award–winning author began posting on Instagram, and the account quickly took off. Inspired by the captioned photo format, this book provides an image for every day of the year and descriptions that are by turns intimate, humorous, and insightful, and each bit of text adds human depth to the image. Smith, who writes and takes pictures every day, is clearly comfortable with the social media platform—which “has served as a way to share old and new discoveries, celebrate birthdays, remember the departed, and salute our youth”—and the material translates well to the page. The book, which is both visually impactful and lyrically moving, uses Instagram as a point of departure, but it goes well beyond to plumb Smith’s extensive archives. The deeply personal collection of photos includes old Polaroid images, recent cellphone snapshots, and much-thumbed film prints, spanning across decades to bring readers from the counterculture movement of the 1960s to the present. Many pages are taken up with the graves and birthdays of writers and artists, many of whom the author knew personally. We also meet her cat, “Cairo, my Abyssinian. A sweet little thing the color of the pyramids, with a loyal and peaceful disposition.” Part calendar, part memoir, and part cultural record, the book serves as a rich exploration of the author’s fascinating mind. “Offered in gratitude, as a place to be heartened, even in the basest of times,” it reminds us that “each day is precious, for we are yet breathing, moved by the way light falls on a high branch, or a morning worktable, or the sculpted headstone of a beloved poet.”
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44854-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
An erudite plea to not give up on truth.
A film director addresses the assault on truth.
“All my life, my work has been involved with the central issue of truth,” Herzog writes in this brief collection of essays. Like many others, he is worried about the ease with which people can be deceived into accepting falsehoods as reality, such as the seemingly real online chat between him and a Slovenian philosopher “in which our voices are mocked up very accurately, but our conversation is meaningless twaddle.” That some of these threats have their positive side, Herzog writes, makes the problem even more vexing. AI, he notes, can help with “improvements in the design of vaccines,” but it also presents “the possibility of comprehensive, mass supervision, of disinformation, of manipulation on a vast scale.” In these impassioned pieces, he offers his insights into the threats to the concept of truth. Fake news, he points out, is nothing new. One can trace the phenomenon back as far as 1275 B.C.E. and the falsehood that, at the battle of Kadesh, Ramses II was a great conqueror, when in fact “Ramses was not triumphant, [and] the battle was inconclusive at best.” Herzog presents many examples of delusion, including the flat earth theory, the “technical possibilities of producing fictive ‘truths’” with Photoshop and TikTok, deepfake porn on the internet, and more. He is especially animated over “the foolish belief that equates truth with facts,” reserving particular scorn for cinema verité, “an antiquated form of cinema that offers no profound insights.” Little is original here, but Herzog is an engaging ally, and he isn’t above cheekily harmless deceptions of his own. When he was in Panama and dressed in missionary garb for his role in Harmony Korine’s film Mr. Lonely, a local approached him and wanted to confess. Herzog listened to the man’s confession and “granted him absolution in Latin.”
An erudite plea to not give up on truth.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780593833674
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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