An often compelling life story that would have benefited from some streamlining.
An attorney describes moments of triumph and tragedy that have shaped his life.
Ewell’s memoir begins on a Saturday morning in April 1992—the day that his oldest brother, Dale, his sister-in-law, and niece were all laid to rest in a Fresno cemetery. They’d all been shot and killed on Easter Sunday, and Ewell’s nephew was responsible for their deaths. Throughout this remembrance, the strong influence that Dale had on the author throughout his life is palpable. Ewell tells of his beginnings on his family’s farm, not far from Cleveland, and is candid in his descriptions of both the serenity and harshness of rural life: “While there was beauty and peacefulness on the farm, there was ever-present suffering as well….Death was everywhere: the shooting of dogs by Dad if they chased sheep, the trapping and killing of animals for their fur that I participated in.” Later chapters cover his time in law school, starting in 1963, in the burgeoning countercultural mecca of San Francisco as well as his budding legal career, his first marriage and family life, eventual divorce, and remarriage in Fresno. Along the way, the author enters Republican politics, hobnobs with celebrity athletes, such as Michael Jordan and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young, and becomes a real estate and golf club developer. Over the course of this memoir, Ewell’s prose is pleasant, straightforward, and evocative. His descriptions of farm life are particularly vivid, as when he recalls how “evening dampness settled over the rows of raked, sweet-smelling alfalfa.” At times, however, he includes an overabundance of unnecessary detail that can slow the narrative; for example, the final, 25-page chapter of the book tediously recounts how “the never-ending lawsuits related to my divorce” threatened the author’s land-development project.
An often compelling life story that would have benefited from some streamlining.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68463-141-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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