An informative, if overstuffed, hiking account that’s brimming with captivating high energy.
A memoir brings readers along step by step on a man’s hiking adventures through the trails of western Canada’s National Park System.
With two months of free time between assignments—Obasohan worked in the field of protection for workers in nuclear power plants—the author decided to make use of his closet full of unused hiking and camping equipment. In his book, he describes himself as an adventurer rather than a hiker. Even after trekking by foot over 212 km (131 miles), he maintains that he is not a hiker. Nonetheless, in July 2021, Obasohan set out by car from Ontario, heading west toward Saskatchewan. His first solo backcountry trip was in Grasslands National Park, where he set up his tent in the Valley of a Thousand Devils, a name that inspired his persistently active imagination. He writes of hours spent walking in the intense heat with no shade in sight: “It was as hot as hell. I couldn’t see them, but I must have been close to a devil’s lair, several lairs possibly for every degree the temperature rose.” There were other dangers, some fanciful, others real. Bears—and, later, cougars—were constantly roaming in almost all the parks he visited. Yet he chose to remain “bear aware” rather than carry bear spray. Next up was Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, a six-hour drive from those tricky devils, continuing his journey driving and hiking, moving westward on his way to the trails in British Columbia. With a peppering of acerbic commentary—“I could see his canister of bear spray in a holster on his hip. This is the Canadian version of open carry firearms”—Obasohan maintains an articulate, conversational banter throughout the narrative. His descriptions of scenery, topography, and activities are vivid and visceral, albeit sometimes exhaustingly detailed. Readers accompany him as he jumps from stone to stone across streams, traipses through cool forests (with too many spiderwebs), sinks into swampy patches of mud, and climbs up and down hills and mountains, compulsively pushing his body to its limits. It is a reading experience that is best appreciated in intermittent bites.
An informative, if overstuffed, hiking account that’s brimming with captivating high energy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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