Russo is quite a bit better than this collection would suggest, but completists will forgive him.
Musings on the author’s past, his life as a writer, and recent cultural topics.
Russo has done outstanding and widely acclaimed work in fiction (Empire Falls, Straight Man, the North Bath Trilogy) and has also written a strong memoir (Elsewhere), so a collection of personal essays written over the past several years sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. But it would take a slightly different set of essays and more scrupulous pruning to produce the version of that book a devoted admirer might imagine. Not much of interest is left to say about the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russo says some of it more than once. “There was simply no definition of essential worker broad enough to include a seventy-one-year-old novelist,” he posits early on, noting in a later essay that “it’s hard to argue that writers are essential workers.” The notion that “writers use people,” far from fresh and seemingly owned by Joan Didion, comes up in “Triage” and in later essays is deemed “probably worth saying again,” twice. Is it really the right time for an essay framed around “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” Which of Russo’s parents was right about America? This is one of the themes of a long essay, “Marriage Story,” that contains memoir material familiar to the author’s many fans, and much of it is reprised in a thematically adjacent essay titled “Ghosts.” On the other hand, those same readers are likely to enjoy Russo’s observations about the genesis of his story “The Whore’s Child” in “The Lives of Others,” his take on the fraught question of whether we must only write what we know. As he explains, he felt closer to, and prouder of, his octogenarian nun character than to his seemingly more autobiographical middle-aged writer—and breaks down exactly why and how.
Russo is quite a bit better than this collection would suggest, but completists will forgive him.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780593802168
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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