An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.
From the wilderness of Colorado, two writers share their anxieties and hopes.
In late March, Houston and Irvine began writing to each other from their homes on opposite sides of the San Juan Mountains. What started as a contribution to Orion magazine’s online pandemic series continued, resulting in a collection, gracefully illustrated by Taylor, that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times. Both women are “intensely aware” that they write from a place of privilege: “two healthy white women in respectful, loving relationships who have the enormous privilege of doing meaningful work from home, with plenty of food socked away and some of the most beautiful and accessible wildlands all around.” Yet despite their good fortune, they reveal past wounds and present challenges. For example, both had abusive fathers and mothers who said they regretted having them; both have scar tissue in their lungs from pneumonia and high altitudes, making them particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. Irvine has a daughter who suffers from epilepsy and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder. “What I know for sure,” she writes, “is that privilege doesn’t spare you from trauma, although it can lessen the blow, and the aftermath.” Motherhood, womanhood, work, and nature recur as themes, as does frustration with Donald Trump and with neighbors who vehemently refuse to wear masks. “I watch this administration attack and destroy every single thing that brings me joy,” Houston writes, “air and water, sure, trees and animals, every slice of wildness we have left, but also the arts, education, diversity itself, Amtrak, solar power, the post office.” They wonder if post-pandemic life will be different. “Battling for a better world is the only occupation now,” notes Houston, “and it is women’s turn to lead the charge, maybe with a few good men in tow.”
An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948814-38-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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