A discerning analysis.
The afterlife of a song.
In a thoughtful contribution to the publisher’s Singles series, which examines the personal and social significance of a discrete musical track, Smith, a professor of French, focuses on Brel’s famous “Ne me quitte pas,” written and performed in 1959. As a 16-year-old, hearing Simone’s cover of the song, Smith was captivated. “I credit this song,” she writes, “as one of the reasons I, a Black American woman from a monolingual, English-speaking family, studied French in college. And it was Nina who made sure I kept with it when the whitewashed curriculum of my textbooks suggested French was a language only for white people.” Melding memoir, literary analysis, and cultural criticism, Smith creates a meditation on translation, adaptation, and appropriation, exploring how Brel’s “ode to romantic despair” has traveled across “geographies, genres, and generations,” performed in almost 30 languages, including Hebrew, Japanese, and Russian. Smith discusses Simone’s choice in making the song one of her signature pieces, her decision to sing it in French, even though she spoke the language imperfectly, and the connection the piece had to her identity as a Black American. Like Simone, the British performer Shirley Bassey, also Black, was drawn to the piece, which she sang in poet Rod McKuen’s English translation. McKuen’s version, which included musical changes, afforded the piece a larger audience but altered its tenor, leading Smith to ask whether it is better described “as a derivation, a transcreation, or an adaptation.” Incorporating literary and cultural theory, Smith considers how race and gender have factored into the performance and reception of the piece, as well as how its meaning has been changed by renditions in film, theater, drag performance, and even a Cirque du Soleil show.
A discerning analysis.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781478028253
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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