A hopeful and encouraging reframing for recent college graduates, if a little cursory and scant on actionable details.
The expansion on a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s commencement address to her alma mater.
In May 2025, Kantor addressed the graduating class of Columbia University. Despite all their much-lauded potential, ambition, and newly conferred prestigious degrees, these seniors were transitioning to working adulthood with much fear, doubt, and existential hand-wringing. Having navigated the Covid-19 pandemic, consuming campus protests sparked by the most recent Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ire of President Trump, they were emerging into a landscape of AI interviews, increased skepticism of authority, and much hemming and hawing about their economic and professional fragility. Dismayed by the ominous aura encircling this generation, the author offers a short, graduation-gift-ready text as an encouraging “letter from an older ally.” Her initial chapters discuss the importance of honing a craft, identifying and addressing larger needs, and challenging the money-passion dichotomy, with examples drawn from both her personal experience and colleagues, recent graduates, and business owners in her orbit. But most of the nuggets in the “series of notes” that round out her text, while gracious and worthwhile, lack the teeth and flesh to give heft to the guidance that the title promises. Sparse bits tease topics like the possibility of nonlinear career paths and healthy employee-employer relationships, about which someone with Kantor’s experience, clout, and investigative chops could certainly offer much more substantial insight. Given that her topic sits adjacent to questions (which the author herself identifies) about the point of higher education itself and the strumming inevitability of turbulence and doom of today’s grim narratives and forecasts, her stubborn insistence on imagining boundless opportunity can feel simplified and rosy. And yet, within this same context, even the author's general exhortation to self-discovery, bravery, and, above all, optimism, also manages to feel restorative, and almost radical.
A hopeful and encouraging reframing for recent college graduates, if a little cursory and scant on actionable details.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316609555
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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