Not as riveting as Kiernan’s previous books but still a bright tribute to Thanksgiving’s expression of gratitude and grace.
Kiernan traces the history of the formalization of Thanksgiving Day while reframing the holiday’s sense of gratitude.
The author’s overarching concern is the timeless role of gratitude in the practice of thanksgiving days scattered throughout the year. Her main character is Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879), who, as a magazine editor, became “an influencer…of fashion, manners, and the well-set table” as well as a force behind the publishing of such writers as Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman. In addition to penning “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” she displayed a singular passion in championing the making of Thanksgiving Day a national holiday. She believed that in bestowing federal stature upon Thanksgiving, the citizenry would experience “a grand spectacle of moral power and human happiness,” and she lobbied presidents to support her cause, beginning with Zachary Taylor. Hale emerges as an intriguing yet hardly revolutionary historical figure. “As tirelessly as Hale may have advocated, in action and voice, for women’s education and marital rights,” writes the author, “she stopped far short of being a suffragette. Hale would never lobby for the blanket rights of women.” Throughout, the author attempts to burnish Hale’s appeal, with mixed success. “Hope sprang eternal. Her pen would not rest,” writes Kiernan, emphasizing her subject’s ceaseless striving for “a coming day of thanks that would herald the virtue of gratitude in these cruel times.” As the author admits, Hale was a traditionalist who felt that “anarchy is worse than despotism. The final third of the book is the most interesting, as Kiernan engagingly explores the economic, political, and cultural roots and consequences of holiday practice, including the connections between Thanksgiving and football (“never in her life would Hale have envisioned football being part of the national celebration”), war, pandemics, and relevant historical episodes such as the 1621 day of thanks between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag people.
Not as riveting as Kiernan’s previous books but still a bright tribute to Thanksgiving’s expression of gratitude and grace.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18325-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An unflinching self-portrait.
The tumultuous life of a bisexual, autistic comic.
In her debut memoir, Scottish comedian Brady recounts the emotional turmoil of living with undiagnosed autism. “The public perception of autistics is so heavily based on the stereotype of men who love trains or science,” she writes, “that many women miss out on diagnosis and are thought of as studious instead.” She was nothing if not studious, obsessively focused on foreign languages, but she found it difficult to converse in her own language. From novels, she tried to gain “knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor” that others found so familiar. Often frustrated and overwhelmed by sensory overload, she erupted in violent meltdowns. Her parents, dealing with behavior they didn’t understand—including self-cutting—sent her to “a high-security mental hospital” as a day patient. Even there, a diagnosis eluded her; she was not accurately diagnosed until she was 34. Although intimate friendships were difficult, she depicts her uninhibited sexuality and sometimes raucous affairs with both men and women. “I grew up confident about my queerness,” she writes, partly because of “autism’s lack of regard for social norms.” While at the University of Edinburgh, she supported herself as a stripper. “I liked that in a strip club men’s contempt of you was out in the open,” she admits. “In the outside world, misogyny was always hovering in your peripheral vision.” When she worked as a reporter for the university newspaper, she was assigned to try a stint as a stand-up comic and write about it; she found it was work she loved. After “about a thousand gigs in grim little pubs across England,” she landed an agent and embarked on a successful career. Although Brady hopes her memoir will “make things feel better for the next autistic or misfit girl,” her anger is as evident as her compassion.
An unflinching self-portrait.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593582503
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
