An often beautiful survey of tragedy and rebuilding.
In this debut memoir, an art collector tells of undergoing surgery in her early 30s and how it upended her life and destroyed her health.
In this moving story of hope, empowerment, and forgiveness, Margain grapples with a life-altering mistake and chronicles her emotional journey to Casa Lotus—a home in Texas Hill Country that, as the book opens, she and her husband, Eduardo, have planned but not yet built. The Mexican-born Margain notes that “family is everything in Mexican culture,” and she describes how she moved with her own family from Monterrey to Mexico City at the age of 12 and, later, to Austin, Texas, carrying her culture with her. Endearing scenes of later meeting her husband in New York City, and their years of marriage and building the Margain-Junco Collection of art together, pepper the narrative. One day, several months after her son was born in 2012, the 30-something author visited her doctor and told him that she sensed that something was wrong with her, although she lacked “any real symptoms.” At the time, Margain was raising three young children, including a newborn, and dealing with the loss of her grandmotherand her sister’s cancer diagnosis. Her doctor told her that she might have depression, but she felt that something else was going on. She visited multiple physicians, and a CT scan later revealed a tumor on her adrenal gland, which a surgeon removed. However, something went wrong during the procedure, the author says, which profoundly altered her life. Margain’s remembrance superbly details how people can find freedom and healing in forgiveness, and her story will resonate with readers who are seeking hope, a sense of spirituality, and faith that things happen for a reason. With that goal in mind, the memoir cites Buddhist teachings from spiritual teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh, biblical passages (“The truth shall set you free”), thoughts from Hindu gurus, and secular conceptions of integrity and morality. She also offers insights on how anger—particularly female anger, which, she asserts, is often repressed—can also be a potent productive force.
An often beautiful survey of tragedy and rebuilding.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7363905-0-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Cuco Press
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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