A charming and personable (if not entirely useful) writing guide.
A master thriller author explains how he does it.
Having written 38 novels—“I think”—beginning at age 21 while working for his family’s travel agency as a tour guide in Spain (though that one remains in the drawer), Coben sets out to describe his process and to debunk the many instructions and shibboleths laid down by “other writers.” Should you always start with character? Nay! You can start with plot, or at least the beginnings of a plot, but you can also start with setting, as the author did with The Boy From the Woods (2020). “It’s messy,” as he repeats many times, and also fiction is memoir and memoir is fiction; if we never do find out where to start, it’s fun and interesting to read about “the Coben Method,” a system of simultaneously writing and rewriting that produces a first draft that is actually the 10th. Amusingly, despite the scorn for the wisdom dispensed by others, the most functional piece of advice in the book comes to us via Anne Lamott, whose Bird by Bird (1994) is proclaimed the author’s favorite on the topic. (It’s good old “shitty first drafts,” here translated as a call to “accept and even embrace our suckage.”) Coben flavors his admittedly contradictory exhortations with a heaping helping of autobiography, affectionately describing his parents, his brilliant brothers (he was considered the “nice” one, “and we all know what that’s a euphemism for”), and his suburban childhood in Livingston, New Jersey. These took an exciting detour when his grandfather was investigated as a member of the Jewish mafia, and the extended family took a sudden, unplanned road trip to Canada. We do certainly learn how Coben does it, employing a writing practice so dedicated that he carries a backpack full of writing materials with him at all times and will sit down to write literally anywhere. A table in the deli section of the grocery store functioned as his study for several months, and he is “writing this paragraph right now in a boat while my four kids snorkel in a nearby cove.” No one would argue the point that, whatever it is, it works for him.
A charming and personable (if not entirely useful) writing guide.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781538784624
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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