A provocative and disturbing look at unmoored men in distress.
Lives of not-so-quiet desperation.
While investigative journalist and author Ronson (The Psychopath Test, 2011) recovered from surgery in 2023, his son, Joel, frantically texted him late one night after an eerie trip to a party at a Gothic-style castle in Connecticut. Along with three friends, Joel found himself in the unnerving presence of the property’s owner, whose true intentions, Joel says, were to cast women for a proposed Netflix lord-seeking-princess reality show. The disquieting event sparks Ronson’s curiosity about the property owner. His research uncovers that the enormous medieval-style castle, replete with a drawbridge, turrets, gargoyles, and a Playboy Mansion-inspired hot-tub grotto room, was owned by Chicago steel industry heir Chris Mark, a divorced, bipolar scion in his 60s who “lured” women to the property. Ronson visits Mark and his mansion in search of answers, prompting an investigation into why certain men, several of whom he profiles in depth, seemed stuck in a state of powerless, purposeless anxiety. Although Mark ends up recanting much of what he’d divulged to Ronson during their interview, his “spiraling” behavior inspires the author to investigate other “unraveling” men “losing their footing in the world, falling out of time—mostly because I was, to be honest, very scared of becoming one myself.” The men he writes about include “Manosphere Man” Dan Bilzerian, “whose thirty-one million Instagram followers got to watch him sit on thrones next to lions, walk through forests with assault rifles, and dine on private yachts with near-naked women.” The author also witnesses the disgraced actor Armie Hammer “in the midst of a hedonistic spree.” In inserting himself into examinations of these men (Mark’s is particularly head-spinning), Ronson provides exacting details and insider perspectives amplifying his subjects’ psychological motivations and their consequences. The result is a mesmerizing work of gonzo journalism at its most intriguing.
A provocative and disturbing look at unmoored men in distress.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781594634208
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
