A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.
A lively compendium that proves that, at least in some respects, you can indeed judge a book by its cover.
The cover or dust jacket of a book does many jobs, write literary scholar Alworth and designer Mendelsund, creative director at the Atlantic: It’s meant to sell the book, of course, but it’s also ideally a work of art. The latter requires explanation, “since art is usually understood to have no commercial purpose whatever, and there’s no getting around the fact that book covers are advertisements.” In the most memorable instances, there’s no question of the art aspect: Think of the cover of The Great Gatsby, with its all-seeing female eyes, an image that figures at several points in this book. The challenge of doing double duty as art and ad grows greater with the increased digitization of the book, whether as an e-book or as a physical object sold online, in either instance requiring the cover to be “as effective at 1 1/2 inches tall, which is the size of an Amazon thumbnail image, as they are at 9 inches tall, displayed in the window of the brick-and-mortar bookstore.” Alworth and Mendelsund range widely in their examples, from pulp fiction to the most elevated literature—Ulysses, for example, whose cover made highly effective use of the then-new Futura typeface. Some covers are accidental, as when the designer of A Clockwork Orange, in its movie tie-in edition, failed to come through, requiring an all-night session from the art director. “Every time I see that image,” he says, “all I see are the mistakes.” Mistakes or no, the design is brilliant, as are the covers of Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman (its single drop of blood signals the genre) and Lee Clay Johnson’s Nitro Mountain, whose designer notes that the photo of “a deer alerted to footsteps” connects to “The premise in film that fear builds in the anticipation, rather than in the thing itself.”
A book about books that deserves a spot in every bibliophile’s collection.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-58102-1
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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