An informative but dry account of a life rich with experience and purpose.
An African American engineer traces his progression from a farming background in Jim Crow Florida to academia in this debut memoir.
The author was born in 1938 on the family farm in Sawdust, a rural community in northwest Florida. In the book’s opening pages, he describes riding the school bus to middle school and seeing a cross that had been burned on a property owned by a black family—a chilling reminder that the Ku Klux Klan was active in his county. Remembering a time when “blacks entered a white person’s house through the back door,” he also recounts the simple pleasures of childhood, such as learning to make his own toys, including “popguns, slingshots,” and “baseballs.” Despite graduating from high school as salutatorian, Thigpen found few alternatives to working on the farm. As soon as he was old enough, he volunteered for the Army, where he was deployed to West Germany in 1956. His active duty ended nearly three years later, and he returned to America, taking laborer work before becoming an engineering student. In 1970, the author received a Ph.D. and went on to become chair of the department of mechanical engineering at Howard University. Thigpen’s autobiography deftly offers a disturbing first-person record of segregation. Regarding looking for construction work, he writes: “I followed up but was told that their company did not hire blacks.” The book also skillfully pays tribute to the author’s perseverance and ingenuity, describing how he used his knowledge of algebra and trigonometry to find work laying out farm plots. But while Thigpen’s journey is an intriguing one, it is sometimes flatly described. The author crafts inelegant sentences that often include unnecessary repetition: “Our cousin Aunt Addie’s youngest son—Donald (‘Pat’)—took us to gather wood for cooking and heating in an area on our farm next to the property on the south side of our farm.” Thigpen also has a tendency to digress, providing unimportant facts that serve only as filler: “The next day, a Saturday, John and I spent most of the day moving a woman friend of his sister to a new location.” Illustrated with family photographs, the author’s story is one of significant achievement but his writing at times falls a bit short.
An informative but dry account of a life rich with experience and purpose. (appendix)Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72832-960-4
Page Count: 332
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
© 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.
