A brilliantly photographed tribute to the rise of the 44th president.
An appealing pictorial biography of the pre-presidential Barack Obama.
In early 2004, Katz joined Obama’s senatorial campaign as a volunteer driver and then photographer and aide. In this well-rendered photographic celebration, he shows the trajectory of Obama from state politician to leader of the free world. The photos are all high quality and cover a vast range of moments, from Obama getting his haircut by his longtime barber near Hyde Park to the presidential hopeful in tears when he learned, two days before the 2008 election, that the grandmother who raised him had just died. Throughout, Katz emphasizes his theme of the “many small moments in Obama’s life when his political career was just gaining traction.” It all began when the budding photographer decided that the unknown Obama needed “more compelling” pictures on his website. The campaign had only 10 staffers and couldn’t pay Katz, but they offered him a volunteer position. So he spent 10 months driving the candidate around the state before becoming his personal aide. Alongside the photos, the author offers illuminating commentary—on the role of the Secret Service, Michelle’s take, the Al Smith dinner, a rally with Bruce Springsteen—and it’s interesting to consider how Katz designed the layout. He made the wise choice to group together many shots, so we have a set with Stevie Wonder and Robin Williams, Oprah Winfrey, George Soros, Nelson Mandela, the Bidens, and Leonardo DiCaprio, among many others. Along the way, readers will learn how politicians rise as they connect with celebrities and funders, and the narrative is packed with entertaining vignettes. For example, Oprah didn’t think the Obamas’ Chicago apartment was the right setting for O, The Oprah Magazine, so she took the shoot outdoors. The book also features a foreword by Obama himself.
A brilliantly photographed tribute to the rise of the 44th president.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-302874-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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