An intelligent, harrowing, and boldly confessional account of a survivor.
After being traumatized as a child, a woman describes her descent into homelessness in this memoir.
“My life deteriorated the day Becky died,” remarks Baker, commenting on the death of her childhood dog, her only confidant. The author recounts that she was abused by her father from the age of 4 and was passed among his friends at 6. Consequently, Baker was taught to hide the truth. Her silent pain led to misbehavior in school, property damage, and brushes with the Australian police. By 16, a friend, concerned that she was slipping into alcoholism, convinced the author to start counseling. The sessions began to help, but being fired from her first job—instigated by a co-worker who, she asserts, sexually abused her—compounded her feelings of mistrust. In this first installment of a trilogy, Baker recalls how she grew addicted to drugs and alcohol and became homeless for two years, finding shelter under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In her darkest moment on the street, the author aimed a knife at her own stomach. Baker’s writing courageously and lucidly excavates deep emotional recesses: “If you asked me then or today where my safe place was, it was in my mind. I had no other place that I could call safe.” Stylistically explosive at times, as when the book relates her response to disapproving passersby—“I would always yell back at the cowardly judges, ‘You give me a fuckin’ shower then!’ I stuck my middle finger in the air”—the memoir is meditative as well. At one point, the author ruminates about the Harbour Bridge: “To me, it was a connection in time, a fortification that holds secrets. It has history, though worlds apart, from the sixteen men who died building the Sydney Harbour Bridge to sixty years later, a place that gave me refuge.” But the work has a few flaws. Baker’s use of a nonlinear timeline can prove confusing, although the revisiting of her past accentuates how her childhood trauma lived on in adulthood. This approach also leads to the repetition of details (“Bridge builders left scraps of metal, chemical waste”; “metal scraps, empty beer cans, chemical waste”). Still, Baker is a talented, versatile writer whose frank book will resonate strongly with those facing similar issues.
An intelligent, harrowing, and boldly confessional account of a survivor.Pub Date: May 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-351-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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