A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America.
A poignant memoir of displaced German Jews and their struggle to find a home.
“While no one in my grandparents’ or parents’ generation attempted to pass as Gentiles,” writes novelist and biographer Toynton, “their whole culture, their entire sense of their identity, was German.” This self-identification extended in all directions: Apart from an occasional word, they spoke German and not Yiddish; German patriots, they scorned the “peasant” Jews of the Eastern European shtetl, so much so that a friend of the author’s asserted that the German Jews supported Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Their German world crumbled when Hitler came to power, and Toynton’s parents made their way to America, followed by some survivors who still believed “that Germany was a superior country to every other, perhaps to America most of all.” The author’s sensitive portrayal of these newcomers reveals different ways of contending with the past: the father who often traveled to Germany for business after the war, confident that the Nazis were no more; the uncle who accepted the promise of acculturation only to have it torn away from the Jews, “leaving them with nothing at all.” In that broken promise, Toynton finds reason to repudiate her family’s snobbish rejection of the Ostjuden, which “amounted to a hatred of what we were.” The author’s tone is often elegiac, and some of her episodes are strikingly gaunt; for instance, she hazards, walking among the broken residents of a geriatric home, that each would ask her to kill them if given the chance. Toynton also finds large insights in small incidents, as when, extolling the virtues of LSD, she is brought up short by an aunt who objects to the unearned shortcut to enlightenment.
A thoughtful, notable addition to the literature of the Holocaust and those survivors who started anew in America.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781953002389
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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