An often challenging but delightful account of personal growth and pushing one’s limits.
A travelogue of a northbound hike on the Appalachian Trail by a family of eight.
Crawford, the author of Unleash Your Family (2020), presents a compelling account, written with McCracken, of his challenging 2018 thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail with his wife, Kami, and their six kids, ages 2 to 17 (the youngest child was carried). The book is effectively an accompaniment to an array of social media–based accounts of the Crawford family hike, as it includes frequent links to videos and other resources as well as photographs and posts from the children’s journals; the latter can be distracting when treated as illustrations rather than text. Overall, though, Crawford’s book provides a raw, honest look at the family’s five-month adventure. During the hike, the author came to terms with abandoning thru-hiker orthodoxies: “We had to remember that we weren’t on the A.T. to please other hikers, internet observers, or some fictitious panel of judges grading our purity. All that mattered was hiking the hike that worked for our family.” Crawford also poignantly describes how they faced a bureaucratic tangle that prevented their ascent to the summit of Mount Katahdin, the trail’s official northern terminus. During the journey, the family also learned to accept help, including offers of food and lodging from strangers. The book includes unsparing accounts of moments when Crawford felt that he’d failed his kids as well as times when he learned not to underestimate them. His real-time social media accounts of the hike generated negative commentary on Reddit and other sites, and he writes about this frequently, as well. Overall, this is an engagingly written memoir that addresses not only the challenges of all-weather long-distance hiking, but also the evolution of family dynamics in the face of tough decisions. It also hints at a previous affiliation with a traditional religious community that the family had long since left, but it provides little detail about this part of their past, which may leave some readers feeling frustrated. However, this doesn’t detract from a compelling narrative that seeks to include readers on the hike every step of the way.
An often challenging but delightful account of personal growth and pushing one’s limits.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0242-7
Page Count: 468
Publisher: FFT Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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