A melodic medley about music and memory.
In this essay collection, Gorham, the founder of Sarabande Books, reviews her life’s losses through songs that helped her to understand them.
The author writes that she was collecting melancholy music long before she thought that it might serve as a suitable playlist for her inevitable funeral. After all, there are many times in life when a sad song is necessary: “No life in its many stages is without bereavement,” writes Gorham in her introductory note. “And, whether it’s the thunder and brilliance of Mozart’s Requiem, the sultry, somber notes of Nina Simone’s love song, or the simple Irish melody of ‘The Parting Glass,’ elegiac music gives us access to deeper regions of thought and imagination.” Those are just three of the dozen songs that have informed Gorham’s sense of mortality; Vivaldi’s “Winter,” for instance, reminds her of foolish risks she took as a teenager in Switzerland, and of a Vespa crash that nearly killed her husband. Jeri Southern’s version of “Dancing on the Ceiling,” from the musical Ever Green, allows her to consider how death and life are inversions of each other. The author effectively ruminates on the uncanny marriage of music and loss across multiple genres, from classical to blues to folk rock, and even some unrecorded, diegetic melodies. The call of the mourning dove—perchoo-oo-oo-o, in Gorham’s rendering—is the sound the author associates with her mother’s illness and death from cancer; her mother’s absent-minded hum, “a stay against chaos, a modest argument against death,” gets a brief chapter. Music is famously a difficult art form to capture on the page, but Gorham has the imaginative vocabulary to succeed at it; she also has a talent for the succinct, poetic observation: “A song is a living thing that occupies a body very briefly,” she writes. “Either it dies from lack of use, or it moves along through the centuries evolving, as generations come and go.” Overall, these essays are perhaps a bit too free of incident to be completely captivating, but there are many thoughtful passages that will stick in the mind.
A melodic medley about music and memory.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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