An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.
Musings on our pop-culture pasts.
Blending memoir and pop criticism, Madison’s essays lace deeply intimate stories with lavish praise and punishing blows for icons of the ’80s and on. A critic, podcast host, and TV writer, Madison pulls few punches as he lures readers into a deep nostalgia. “The beauty of nostalgia,” he writes, “is that most people forget the things that they hated about something they love.” We remember a star or a show for a moment—a song or a scene that fixated us at the time, or simply because those were the people we told our friends we loved and so defined our lives. If this retrospective flattening offers us a more cohesive view of the past, then Madison is adept at re-creating the seamlessness with which media and real life can sometimes mesh. The memoir aspects of developing an understanding of his sexuality and self-image, parsing through family dynamics, and ricocheting between majority Black and majority white spaces in education are shot through with notes on Oprah, The O.C., Tom Cruise, the Power Rangers, and even Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Where the author pauses to pull apart the seams, he reveals an absurdity hidden beyond our memory. Madison’s ability to re-create the limelight, then cast withering shade, is insightful. Writing of Cruise—“a soulless cipher skilled at mimicking human emotion”—he describes the actor as “approximat[ing] human behavior in a way that makes you think he’s learning how humans interact with one another, not merely observing and deciphering it like most actors.” A brilliant critical voice for millennials, those on the cusp, or anyone who has had their eyes open over the past few decades, Madison proves a worthy successor to his own idol, Chuck Klosterman.
An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593446188
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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