A spirited tribute to an impressive woman.
An ebullient biography celebrates a longtime California congresswoman.
In this entry in the Queens of the Resistance series—the other three books focus on Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—Jones and Trotman once again offer a succinct, breezy overview of their subject’s life: this time, Maxine Waters (b. 1938), a “ferocious, fiery leader” who began her political career in 1976 in the California State Assembly. One of 13 children, she grew up “on and off welfare” in racially segregated St. Louis, with aspirations to become either a social worker—many visited the family during Waters’ childhood—or a dancer like the famous African American dancer Katherine Dunham. Marrying just after graduating from high school, Waters soon had two children. Besides raising her family, she worked as a service representative for the Pacific Telephone Company. When a friend told her about an ad for assistant teachers for Head Start, Waters applied; the job, she says, “changed my life and turned it in a new direction.” Involved in the preschool program and other initiatives, she became convinced of the power of community organizing and was inspired to go back to school. In 1970, she graduated from California State, Los Angeles, with a degree in sociology. In conversational prose, Jones and Trotman portray Waters as tireless, determined, and outspoken, with a “no-holds-barred style” that defined her as she made her way into politics. After serving as chief deputy for a city councilman, she won election to state assembly, a post she held for 14 years, taking on issues such as South African apartheid and job training. In 1990, she was elected to Congress, where she railed against the nearly all-male bastion of representatives. Besides holding many positions on the Financial Services Committee, Waters became chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, a prominent champion of voting rights, and an inspiring mentor.
A spirited tribute to an impressive woman.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18987-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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