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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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