An artful and honest account of sacrifice and survival.
A hero of the #MeToo movement tells her full life story in her own words in this revealing, confident memoir.
Ford grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and ’70s. “Living in the land of our founding fathers,” she writes, “built on a system of power that was created by and for men, of course men and women were treated differently and kept conveniently separate.” It was in this environment that she first encountered future Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who, she writes, sexually assaulted her at a party when she was 15. (He was 17.) The experience had a profound effect on her, but as she demonstrates in this courageous text, it was hardly the driving force of her life. For graduate school, she moved to Southern California, where she learned to surf, began her work in psychology and biostatistics, and became a mother. She never imagined she would end up back in D.C. as an adult, testifying during Kavanaugh’s tumultuous nomination hearing. Though she had supported #MeToo, she writes, “even when considering coming forward, I saw myself more as a whistleblower than an activist. I didn’t even identify as a ‘survivor’ at that point (but after enduring the testimony and its aftermath, I would change my view).” Ford offers a cleareyed description of the personal, professional, financial, and emotional fallout, with which she’s still reckoning five years later. She partially attributes her survival to the thousands of letter writers who reached out with thanks, support, and their own assault stories. It is to them she dedicates her memoir, which extends far beyond the hearing that made her a household name. “My story can’t just be about the three months in 2018 when my life exploded in front of the world’s eyes,” she writes. “My life weaves together surfing, statistics, motherhood, friendship, and politics.”
An artful and honest account of sacrifice and survival.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781250289650
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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