A memoir that shows that while truth doesn’t always mean beauty, there’s something to be said for beautiful liars, too.
An obsessive search for honesty that becomes an emotional minefield.
In this uneven but oddly absorbing book, Leviton unapologetically reveals what raw honesty looks and feels like. The author was raised in a household he dubs “a little honesty cult,” in which he was encouraged by his parents to always tell the truth, no matter how painful or embarrassing the circumstances. “My parents…argued that children are born honest,” he writes, “that we revel in self-expression until parents, teachers, and friends punish or shame our honesty away.” Leviton divides his journey into three distinct parts, starting with the inevitable conflicts he inspired in other schoolchildren and the rather bizarre “family therapy camp” that would result in his parents’ divorce. Armed with a creative spark, a flair for the ukulele, and an arch sense of humor often misunderstood by others, the author landed in New York City trying to find work as a writer. This middle part is poignant but also quite painful to read, as the author describes his experiences in a relationship with the love of his life at the time, a graphic artist who regularly broke up with him. Eventually, Leviton decided that the only way to break the poisonous cycle of truth that handicapped him in many ways was to learn to lie. “My early lies,” he writes, “were simple attempts to misrepresent myself as normal,” merely pieces of his “experimentation with dishonesty.” Add to these experiences some peculiar drama on the side—e.g., Leviton philosophically arguing with an armed mugger or accidentally inspiring an orgy—and readers will get the literary equivalent of a radio program they stumbled across but can’t turn off, albeit with the edited parts left in this time.
A memoir that shows that while truth doesn’t always mean beauty, there’s something to be said for beautiful liars, too.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4305-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
SEEN & HEARD
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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