An inspiring treatise on the importance of empathy.
Foreign Policy Association fellow Kirksey aims to guide readers to an understanding of how everyone and everything is connected—and how this fact can foster positive change.
The author, who was born in Rockford, Illinois,noticed early on how adults can teach children unconscious biases. He uses an example of adults rolling up car windows and locking doors when “driving through a neighborhood of people who looked different or spoke a different language.” They aren’t explicitly teaching kids in the back seat to fear those who are different, he notes, but it’s a lesson they implicitly learn, nonetheless. Some people may not ever have the chance to interact with people who live outside their community, so this brief guide aims to overcome learned fears and help readers realize that everyone is connected by shared humanity. This idea, the author says, is “a subliminal understanding that we are strands in the web of life and our well-being is dependent on facilitating the well-being of others,” and people should embrace it by “always seek[ing] we instead of me” to achieve what he calls “intuitive coexistence.” Kirksey’s warm prose is occasionally broken up by visual diagrams, including one of a “stair-step learning model” that demonstrates how to move from “unconscious incompetence” (illustrated by the dictum “ignorance is bliss”) to unconscious competence (in which one’s empathy is “on autopilot”). He also effectively employs personal and historical anecdotes to help illustrate his sometimes-heady points. At the same time, he includes plenty of concrete examples to help readers get started in their own transformative journey, as when he emphasizes the importance of smiling or sharing a kind word. Although the author’s ideas and reflections are certainly grand, the book’s narrative tone never feels overwhelming and, in fact, remains consistently approachable.
An inspiring treatise on the importance of empathy.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9781544537160
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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