Even more endearing than you'd think. Older readers will feel cheered by the story—and the fact that she remembers it all.
A beloved writer in her 70s faces life's heaviest weather.
Ephron, whose career includes humor, plays, screenplays, and novels, chronicles a series of "left turns, some perilous, some wondrous," that began with the death of her sister Nora in 2012, followed a few years later by the death of her husband of nearly four decades—the man "I'd been looking for…my whole life and he felt the same." Not long after Jerry's death, she heard from Peter. Though they had dated briefly in college, she had no memory of him. “My sensibilities had been so rattled by Jerry’s death,” she writes, “I could feel that young girl banging around inside me, waiting to take me down.” Also a recent widower, Peter turned out to be another perfect match. In fact, their relationship, as depicted in the book, goes so well that you keep waiting for it to crash, right up until they are married in a room at the hospital where Ephron began treatment for the very disease that killed her sister. That particular left turn was especially difficult, and the author decided to have her assistant gather all her emails from 2015 to 2018 so she could tell the entire story. Many readers’ only complaint will be that Ephron includes in full more of those emails than is strictly necessary. Along the way, we get wisdom about writing ("Writers are writers first. Before anything else. It's a calling") and charming insight into the relationship the author had with her superfamous older sister. "I didn’t think the doctors were concerned about me, because they were Nora’s doctors,” she writes. “Also, she was a national treasure—a writer and director, reinventor of the romantic comedy, admired by women everywhere. I was just, well, me."
Even more endearing than you'd think. Older readers will feel cheered by the story—and the fact that she remembers it all.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-26765-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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