A beautifully wrought memoir from a pioneering Iraqi author.
An Iraqi poet depicts her wrenching childhood and coming-of-age under her country’s series of debilitating wars.
Growing up in the small town of Najaf, Hassan was the eldest in a growing middle-class family—her father had to work two jobs as a clerk and a cook—that moved often to find better housing and educational opportunities for her and her siblings. School was her refuge, and despite the increasingly tumultuous political events in Iraq, she excelled. By 1980, however, everything changed with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran. “This year and the following ones tattooed all Iraqis with loss and death,” writes Hassan. Though Hussein and his advisers boasted that it would be a quick conquest, it became an eight-year slog that destroyed the country’s economy and caused the senseless deaths of countless Iraqis—all while Hussein ordered the construction of more than 100 lavish palaces. “Ordinary people,” writes the author, “experienced brutal lives as they endured the scourge of abject, relentless, crushing poverty, having been deserted by their government, which had inflicted these woes upon them.” In a vividly detailed narrative, the author is always candid, unafraid to express her feelings. From 1980, she writes, “I was obsessed by a feeling of revulsion—as if a large snake had swallowed me.” School disruptions, food scarcity, the sudden disappearance of friends and family, air sirens, explosions, and government surveillance—all marked her formative years. Fortunately, her father supported her education, and she became an accomplished teacher and then a published poet, the first woman in her town to achieve such a feat. She reluctantly gave in to her family’s wishes and married a man she did not know. The union was disastrous, and Hassan endured death threats by a virulently chauvinistic society that pursued her relentlessly into exile. Throughout, Hassan renders her harrowing experiences in an authentic, heartfelt manner, offering important testimony of personal and national courage.
A beautifully wrought memoir from a pioneering Iraqi author.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3617-7
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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