An often compelling survey of a uniquely demanding career and the life lived around it, with stories that readers won’t find...
Guatemalan journalist Whitbeck recounts his family’s multigenerational history in journalism as well as travels around the world in this genre-bending Spanish-language memoir.
There are few people who can say seeing a dead body changed their lives for the better, but for the author, it was a light-bulb moment. He was barely a teenager during Guatemala’s civil war in the late 1970s, and violence was everywhere; it was on his daily commute to school, peering out at a cadaver from the bus window, that his future solidified: He was going to be a journalist. After getting his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, Whitbeck worked his way up from covering natural disasters in Central America to becoming one of CNN’s senior foreign correspondents. In this memoir and travelogue, he recounts some of his most memorable reporting trips during his decadeslong career, including embedding with U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq, cutting his international journalism teeth at civilian protests in Haiti, and getting to hold the same pen that Gorbachev used to sign the documents dissolving the USSR. He attributes his success to his relentlessly curious nature but admits that journalism may well be his destiny: his ancestors include Spanish conquistador and chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo and American journalist Leonard F. Whitbeck, who covered conflicts between American troops and Indigenous leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Whitbeck even devotes one of the book’s best chapters, an outlier of sorts, to detailing his own father’s involvement in the brief and bloody regime of Guatemalan president Efraín Ríos Montt.
As a narrator, Whitbeck’s greatest strengths are the palpable compassion and humility with which he undertakes the task of reporting on communities in crisis and the deft connections he makes to broader themes of the human condition. The author, who considers himself an introvert and identifies as gay, offers a self-conscious peek into the often opaque world of correspondent journalism; in particular, he’s refreshingly frank about facing racism and xenophobia as a Latino and a member of the Spanish-language press and about the complex traumas of his various sources across the world. His clean prose historically contextualizes his location-based essays without ever overwhelming the reader or deferring to an American perspective. He juxtaposes moments of levity, as when he tells of procuring equine transport in Afghanistan, listening to Coldplay while on assignment, and smoking cannabis for the first time, with the descriptions of the carnage he witnesses. The book isn’t chronological, and the way that Whitbeck jumps through time to suit his philosophizing about the human experience results in occasional passages that feel muddled or disconnected. The final chapter, however, is quite sentimental, ruminating on his life after leaving CNN and how he came to understand himself better through taking psychedelics, culminating in his ultimate takeaway: that death and disaster are simply part of the cycle of life.
An often compelling survey of a uniquely demanding career and the life lived around it, with stories that readers won’t find in the news.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-6070776540
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Planeta Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.
In this debut memoir, Bahamian millionaire Bastian offers insight into building a business.
The author was a millionaire by the time he was 19, an impressive feat considering he began his working life filling stockpots and rolling napkins in his father’s Nassau restaurant, a locals’ hole-in-the-wall far from the city’s tourist hotels. “In many ways, I started ten steps behind the starting line in a world where opportunities felt few and far between,” writes Bastian in his introduction. A poor student with a gambler’s risk tolerance and a salesman’s eye for an unserved market, the author dropped out of college to launch his own satellite installation business—the first of its kind in the Bahamas—eventually expanding into prepaid phones and other electronics. With this book, Bastian uses his personal experiences to illustrate the steps aspiring entrepreneurs should consider when building their own empires. “My goal isn’t just to tell my story,” he explains; “it’s to provide you with a starting point, a strategy, and the encouragement you need to take your first step toward something bigger.” The book alternates between memoiristic chapters describing the author’s youth and career and instructional chapters outlining the best practices to “become a lion” (his preferred metaphor for a brave, risk-taking captain of industry). From evaluating one’s skill set and choosing a suitable goal to the practicalities of regulation and taxes, Bastian walks the reader through the complicated processes of starting and maintaining a successful enterprise. While much of the advice is of the boilerplate variety, the author offers it with clarity and candor, devoting an entire chapter, for example, on how to fail productively. It is the biographical material that lends his advice unusual weight—Bastian’s stories of flying back and forth between the Bahamas and Miami to personally import satellite dishes are fascinating enough to stand on their own. Readers may be unable to replicate his success, but there is no denying that his tale is inspiring.
A rags-to-riches how-to as entertaining as it is wise.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798891882485
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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