Finely crafted, graceful, captivating pieces.
A collection of essays from an incisive cultural observer.
National Book Award winner Thurman, a biographer and essayist who has been a staff writer at the New Yorker for more than two decades, assembles 40 pieces, published from 2007 to 2021, on art, culture, books, and fashion, many focused on the “lost women who have been my specialty as a writer.” The title comes from her own experience growing up left-handed, which taught her that somehow she wasn’t “right,” a feeling echoed by other women she profiles. While not all have been lost to history—Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, Alison Bechdel, Helen Gurley Brown, for example—each of them defied the image of how a “right” woman could and should behave. Thurman’s discoveries include ceramicist and industrial designer Eva Zeisel, a “maverick modernist”; avant-garde photographer Grete Stern; Black fashion designer Ann Lowe, who created Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding dress; and outspoken Betty Halbreich, a personal shopper at Bergdorf’s, who gives Thurman a tour of her own cavernous closets. Thurman’s fascination with fashion—as culture, craft, and art—informs pieces about Charles James, Alexander McQueen, Paul Poiret, and Miuccia Prada, occasioned by museum retrospectives. Thurman’s interests are capacious: lost language speakers, hyperpolygots, Cleopatra, and, not least, art and artists. When she was in her early 20s, living abroad, she met Balthus and posed for his wife, also a painter. She recounts a visit to performance artist Marina Abramović at her Hudson Valley home as well as her visits to sites of prehistoric cave paintings. She also chronicles her discussions with actors Charlotte Rampling (about sex) and Liv Ullmann (about Ingmar Bergman). In her introduction and in a few other essays, Thurman drops a few tantalizing personal details, but memoir is not her aim: “I write about the lives and work of other people in part to understand my own, while avoiding what I feel obliged to do here: talk about myself.”
Finely crafted, graceful, captivating pieces.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60716-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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