A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.
Life lessons gleaned from the work of a musical theater master.
Drama professor and devoted fan Schoch, author of Shakespeare’s House, lovingly explores Stephen Sondheim’s musicals, aiming to show how they can help people achieve a more fulfilling life. “His works understand us as much as we understand them,” the author avers. Zeroing in on 13 shows, he enthusiastically walks us through the essence of each to demonstrate that “Sondheim, if we let him, can change our life.” Schoch notes that in his first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, Sondheim tried to impart the lesson, “Be aware of the roles that you enact in your life,” but it was a flop because he forgot to “put the audience first.” He never forgot it again. Gypsy tells the story of a toxic mother-daughter relationship, but the vivid characterizations expressed in song demonstrate that “hurtful patterns can be disrupted and then replaced by the benevolence of a nurturing heart, beginning with our own.” In the plotless Company, Sondheim anatomizes the “loneliness of modern urban life,” then suggests how we can overcome it in the song “Sorry-Grateful” (a “true masterpiece”). “Whenever I hear the quintet in A Little Night Music warming up,” Schoch writes, “I hear a rehearsal for life.” Sweeney Todd, the ultimate revenge piece, asks us how we would respond to injustice. Merrily We Roll Along, poorly received when it opened in 1981 but a Tony-winning hit in 2024, oozes with feelings of personal regret. On Sunday in the Park With George, Schoch remarks, “How can we not pay attention to a play that honors so elegantly the lost art of paying attention?” Into the Woods confronts “not knowing which path to choose,” and Schoch softly brings down the curtain with Here We Are, which opened in 2023, two years after Sondheim’s death: “a perfect theatrical non finito: not finished, and that’s by design.”
A lively, thoughtful self-help book—sui generis, like the artist who inspired it.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781668030592
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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