An exhaustive and entertaining look into the Kardashian media machine.
A media-driven appreciation of one of pop culture’s most-watched families.
Corey, a psychotherapist, was spontaneously introduced to a Season 6 episode of the TV reality series Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2018, and in that viewing’s wake, admitted to feeling an “uncanny sensation” that drew her in as a casual fan, then, almost hypnotically, into an obsession that has endured for nearly a decade. The author skillfully condenses her years of observation and evaluation as a Kardashian analyst into this obvious labor of love, one that has garnered her a successful personal Substack, a recap magazine column, and a legion of Kardashian-crazed TikTok and Instagram followers. Paired with a personal fascination with the Kardashian family’s collective talent for narrative mastery, a postmodern sense of reality, and catchy episodic arcs, Corey cleverly and effectively fuses celebrity scrutiny and deft analysis with the famous family’s personalities and creates a whirlwind of themes, abstract ideas, and some very solid truths about their roles in modern society and their impact on feminism. Interwoven into the analysis are more easily digested details, including Kim Kardashian’s iconic Halloween costumes and her video games, the family’s sartorial and corporeal trends, their entrepreneurial ventures, eccentric behaviors, and rise to influential fame, along with a parade of narrative divergences featuring Kanye West, O.J. Simpson, and Paris Hilton. The first of the book’s two sections incorporates referential material in addressing how and why public attention spans and tastes have evolved over the past several decades and uses the Kardashians as a prime example of a responsible change agent. The second section features a biographical chronology that proceeds through major milestones in the Kardashians’ lives as collective influencers. In examining the show’s catalog of highly produced episodes—“edited to achieve a near-perfect narrative structure”—Corey digs deeper into the meaning and the message of the “pixel-perfect” family’s popularity, intelligently assessing how their tabloid-worthy, sensational fireworks keep the fires of celebrity culture and viewers’ addiction to reality television consistently stoked.
An exhaustive and entertaining look into the Kardashian media machine.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593701348
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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