A brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.
A memoir about confronting trauma and working toward healing.
In this frank and often searing narrative, Nikolidakis examines what she describes as monstrous abuses perpetrated by her father, who, after leaving her family, murdered his new girlfriend and her daughter before committing suicide. Setting forth “my truth—the emotional truth of my experiences,” the author recounts how she was stunned by the violence that might easily have included her or other family members and slowly began a painful investigation into the wide-ranging impact of her father’s malignancy. She insightfully explores her family’s well-concealed dysfunction, her descent into alcoholism and promiscuity as a teenager, and her long-standing efforts to deny the reality of the psychological and physical torments. Particularly vivid (and harrowing) are those passages that reflect on the divide between her father’s charismatic public presence and the cruelty of his private life. With compelling clarity and eloquence, she anatomizes his ability to manipulate: “I remember nearly a dozen such apologies from those years, each of them cried and slumped, his head held and bowed until I offered forgiveness. I always did, partly because it got him out of my room, but mostly because I believed him. To see grief so close up, to inspect it and work out the algebra of its accuracy, filled me with shame, as though lying near his shame released its contagion.” Nikolidakis concludes by explaining how her search for understanding took her to her father’s homeland in Greece and Crete, where she found a sense of spiritual renewal in reconnecting with his extended family. The text is convincing and memorable in suggesting that the author was, ultimately, able to accept the final unknowability of what drove her father’s destructiveness and to transcend the rage and self-loathing he wrought.
A brave and inspiring account of a movement through pain to a complex reckoning and self-recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-542-03771-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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