A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.
A memoir of incarceration, literature, and redemption.
For one week in August 2003, 25-year-old Genis robbed people at knifepoint to support his $100-per-day heroin habit. Although he immediately told his victims he was sorry, the “Apologetic Bandit” was given a 12-year sentence—10 with good behavior— by a judge who thought the White, middle-class NYU graduate “should have known better.” In a sharp, wry memoir, the author, a journalist and translator, chronicles his life in a dozen compounds in upstate New York, including four maximum security prisons, a world “utterly unknown” to those outside prison walls. He reflects on some of the 1,046 books—by Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, Proust, among many others—that he read while an inmate. “Reading’s evolution into writing,” he found, “made the difference between merely surviving ten years of incarceration and finding meaning in it.” Each chapter focuses on “a specific demographic slice of the incarcerated population”—Blacks, Latinos, gang members, and the mentally ill, for example—or a facet of prison life, such as food, solitary confinement, methods of smuggling in drugs and weapons, rare conjugal visits, and the particular cruelties of being transported on prison buses. Like an anthropologist, Genis sees prison “as a laboratory to study how men self-organize into societies, and watching that development is effectively a look into our Stone Age past.” He notes the codes, behaviors, assumptions, and prejudices that factored into group affiliation. “Race,” he writes, “mattered to an extent I had never witnessed previously. It was both a reason to oppress and to redress perceived wrongs.” As a White man, he found it impossible to “not have some relationship with the concept of white power. One cannot be neutral on the subject; the other prisoners do not allow it. Being white means being a minority, and a hated one at that.” The author’s voice is insightful, candid, and sometimes darkly humorous.
A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-42955-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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