An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.
A heartfelt collection of life lessons inspired by changemakers.
Ghosh, a social impact strategist, combines memoir, biography, and practical advice in this book about the impact that 30 icons, mentors, and family members have made on his approach to service. “Lessons from others not only sustained me but helped me thrive,” he explains. The book opens with a lesson in empathy from his parents, whose generosity inspired the author to start a local community organization to address sanitation issues in the slums of Kolkata, India (Ghosh’s childhood home). The author recalls hearing the Dalai Lama (who contributes this book’s foreword) speak about the importance of showing respect and compassion for low-income citizens as entrepreneurs undertook various development initiatives across the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg served as a role model of civility for Ghosh, who cites Ginsburg’s friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia as an example of her ability to respect and work with others across ideological lines. After meeting Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai in 2013, the author became inspired to speak out about important issues because she taught him that “silence is not an option.” Ghosh concludes with a touching chapter celebrating his son, Ryan, a young man with an adventurous spirit, the ability to embrace diversity, and a passion for fostering connection. The author’s personable voice will make his high-profile life of hobnobbing with globally renowned figures feel relatable to everyday readers—he describes how Mother Teresa made him feel “completely flooded with utter joy at her love, compassion, mercy, and greatness” with just the touch of her hand. However, the narrative occasionally praises controversial figures like Bill Clinton, about whom Ghosh gushes, “It was impossible not to like this man.” Still, the author’s empathy is evident in lines like, “Poverty is a condition created by a social construction that benefits some and not others. It is not a character flaw or a personal failing.” The text lists resources and organizations in each chapter to help readers engage in their own philanthropic efforts.
An uplifting book that views some flawed figures through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9798888459249
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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