An engaging, if slightly shapeless, autobiography.
A woman recounts stories of her hardscrabble coming-of-age in this debut memoir.
Kearse-Stockton was born in 1949, the second of seven children, to a working-class Black couple in York, Pennsylvania. The family home was on the eponymous Codorus Street, where they lived beside other Black families. “These families comprised the Codorus Street Bubble,” writes the author of the segregated neighborhood. “We had block parties and parents had house parties; there were several other bubbles where Negroes lived….Many of the areas were substandard housing. Parents worked together and children played together.” Her father was a long-haul truck driver and was gone for days at a time. When he was home, according to Kearse-Stockton, he dispensed violent beatings to the author, her siblings, and her mother, Dot. Eventually, Dot moved the children away from Codorus Street and her husband’s brutality, but unfortunately, that would not mark the end of violence in Kearse-Stockton’s life. She had three children by the age of 19, at which point her husband, Joe, was murdered in front of her and her kids by a neighbor who accused him of giving his wife gonorrhea. As a young, single mother, the author found herself figuring out how to navigate the world in much the same way that her mother had before her. Kearse-Stockton’s prose is conversational and often funny, as here where she describes her mother’s forcing her sister to help her with one of the family’s normal meals, groundhog: “One day Dot told Mary it was her turn to hold the groundhog’s foot so she could skin and gut it. Mary cried and begged, ‘Please Dot, and do not make me hold the groundhog’s foot.’ The rest of us would be laughing our butts off….Dot told her she was always the first one to want seconds when she made baked groundhog.” The book comprises anecdotes from the author’s childhood and early adulthood, some sweet and some disturbing, with little connective tissue other than a shared cast of characters. The memoir will likely be of most interest to members of her own family and her circle of friends, though readers who wish to know more about York’s Black community in the ’50s and ’60s will find this a valuable history.
An engaging, if slightly shapeless, autobiography.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982255-56-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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