A riveting collection of magazine journalism by a talented practitioner.
Richardson profiles rare and remarkable characters in his latest set of essays.
A group of prisoners performing original comic plays in for the lifers at Sing Sing Prison. A blogger claiming to be a European heiress on the run and taking the early internet by storm. A deeply Christian doctor who travels from out of state in order to perform abortions in the last open clinic in Mississippi. These are just some of the people whom Richardson has met and profiled over the course of his journalism career, and he assembles these portraits in this volume. The seven essays all originally appeared in magazines—six in Esquire and one in New York—and they read with a raconteur breeziness. Readers will meet Michael Brown Sr., whose son’s 2014 killing by a police officer set off months of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and they’ll learn about the mental health of climatologists who spend day after day poring over grim data about our ever-warming planet. Richardson gets personal, too; in the essay “My Father, the Spy”—later expanded into a memoir—the author writes about his father, also John H. Richardson, a high-ranking member of the CIA during the Cold War, whose bitterness and reticence created a permanent rift in his relationship with his journalist son: “I would bait my father at dinner by defending communism—all your better hippies live on communes, don’t they?” remembers the author. Over the course of the volume, Richardson shows himself to be a skilled weaver of words, as when he wryly describes April 2003 as a time “when winter was still hanging around like tuberculosis and the [Iraq] war was still going strong.” More importantly, the author is a talented detective when it comes to locating human drama. Each essay has a gripping story at the center of it (one piece, which gives the collection its title, was adapted for the 2023 film Sing Sing, starring Colman Domingo) and Richardson frequently manages to touch on a larger truth about the America in which it was written.
A riveting collection of magazine journalism by a talented practitioner.Pub Date: July 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781958861400
Page Count: 182
Publisher: The Sager Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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