A challenging and often eye-opening nonfiction debut.
Deep thoughts on contemporary life from the author of the novel Fake Accounts.
Oyler’s debut novel was heavy on social commentary, interrogating such phenomena as Instagram and dating apps and the pressure to turn the self into a marketable product. In her second book, she explores similar themes. In “Embarrassment, Panic, Opprobrium, Job Loss, Etc.,” the author reflects on gossip as cultural currency by analyzing examples from her own life, the rise and fall of Gawker, and the #MeToo movement, among other subjects. This essay is not a puff piece; it’s more than 40 pages long, and it’s clearly the product of significant research and careful thought. It’s also absorbing and funny. While reflecting on her mother’s habit of sharing scandalous tidbits about Oyler’s friends when she was a child, the author suggests that her mom was trying to both connect with her daughter and provide cautionary tales. “She was also, of course, parenting unconsciously,” she writes, “setting me up to become, among other things, a woman who is interested (and proficient) enough in gossip that she wants to write a long essay about it.” A resonant piece titled “My Perfect Opinions” begins as a tale of Goodreads and revenge and turns into a wry history of the star rating system. “The story begins in 1792, when pretty much everyone in the English writer Mariana Starke’s family had tuberculosis,” she writes. The title, as Oyler explains in the introduction, is ironic. This is a writer with particular views, and she has plenty of interesting things to say about autofiction, spoilers, and life as an expatriate. Some readers have seen Oyler’s work in Harper’s, the London Review of Books, and the Believer, but all of the essays in this collection are published here for the first time.
A challenging and often eye-opening nonfiction debut.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780063235359
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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