A vivid portrayal of six remarkable women who made history reporting on World War II.
An account of six pioneering women who worked as war journalists in World War II.
Mackrell’s chosen six came from different backgrounds though they all ended up writing for British or American news outlets. Some, like Martha Gellhorn, who was married to Ernest Hemingway; or Lee Miller, a popular fashion photographer and Vogue cover model, were already public figures. The others—Virginia Cowles, Clare Hollingworth, Helen Kirkpatrick, and Sigrid Schultz—made their marks with their intrepid reporting. All had barriers to overcome, many the result of outright misogyny (they constantly battled “sexually predatory officers or over-entitled male journalists”), and none of them backed away from dangerous assignments. Mackrell gives enough background on each to show how they became journalists—for most of them, well before the war—and how their initial beats were traditionally “feminine” subjects—e.g., society columns, fashion, or the “woman’s angle” on a topic of broader interest. Nonetheless, the persistence, determination, and daring led them to cover the Spanish Civil War (Gellhorn and Cowles), Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power (Schultz), or the experiences of frontline troops in Europe or North Africa (Hollingsworth and Kirkpatrick). Schultz, writes the author, “could not yet take Hitler seriously as a politician: he seemed to her a crude ‘fascist bugbear,’ a ‘demagogue drunk on his own word.’ ” This is incredibly rich material, and Mackrell makes the most of it, showing Gellhorn stowing away on a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings or Miller taking a bath in Hitler’s tub, an incident immortalized in a famous photograph. The author also describes the reporters’ outraged responses to the concentration camps, which several of them saw shortly after the liberation. Mackrell concludes with a brief summary of the women’s postwar careers, capping off an exhilarating read packed with emotion and genuine humanity.
A vivid portrayal of six remarkable women who made history reporting on World War II.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54766-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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