A moving story that seeks an understanding of one woman’s overwhelming grief.
A stillbirth results in grief that touches a whole community in Del Valle’s memoir.
The author, a psychologist, was more than eight months pregnant with her second child in the early 2000s when she noticed that the fetus had stopped moving. The developing infant, whom Del Valle’s toddler daughter, Eden, had nicknamed “Baby Long Beach,” had never been very active, but the worried author rushed to the hospital for reassurance. There, she was told that the unborn child had no heartbeat. This emotional book tells the story of this loss and its aftermath. The author writes that the staff induced labor, but they offered little help to Del Valle to ease the process; for example, she writes that her doctor had promised that she’d have a timely epidural, so she’d feel no pain during delivery, but this didn’t happen. In addition, as her husband, Dennis, grieved and cared for Eden, Del Valle writes, she felt abandoned. The couple were able to hold their stillborn baby a few times, she writes, and then it was time for them to go home. She effectively writes of painful feelings of loss when thinking of joys denied: “There will be no balloons, no congratulatory signs.” The memoir moves back and forth between the sad day to past events in the author and her spouse’s relationship as they grew closer over the years; it clearly shows how, after a crushing loss, the anguished couple were able to find solace in each other. It also effectively shows how family members, friends, and church members showed up to keep them company, even when they didn’t know what to say. Along the way, occasional poems by the author vividly tap into deeper emotions: “We all come with something. / Spoken and Unspoken. / Fragile. / Tenuous, / Unbreakable.” Overall, this is a chronicle that deserves attention, especially from readers who have suffered similar pain.
A moving story that seeks an understanding of one woman’s overwhelming grief.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987088104
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Organized Chaos Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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