This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading.
The author of Heartland returns with a collection of pieces that illuminate the plights and humanity of her working-class subjects.
“The White, rural, working-poor people about whom I most often write—they are your people too,” writes Smarsh in the introduction to this compendium of 36 essays, the majority of which originally appeared in a range of publications. The author possesses a distinct style, one simultaneously personal and political, with the aim of navigating “the space where storytelling might be at once factual in content and artistic in form.” In her essays, which range from two to 18 pages, she makes frequent references to her own experiences. “I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer parks,” she writes in a 2014 essay about “the teeth of poor folk,” which criticizes America’s costly dental care system and humanizes those who are unable to afford treatment. She calls for the American dream “to put its money where its mouth is” with different laws and “individual awareness of the judgments we pass on people.” Another essay describes Smarsh’s brother, a first-generation college graduate who “had no connections in the professional world, and no one to tell him that communications and history degrees were bad bets to begin with.” As she recounts, he regularly sold his plasma over the course of a decade to make ends meet. In a piece about growing wheat in Kansas, the author writes, “The greater divide in America today is not between red and blue but between what is discussed in powerful rooms and what is understood in the field.” Even though these essays were shaped by more than a dozen editors, this collection’s impact is staggering, and Smarsh’s voice is constant, studied, and compassionate.
This powerful reckoning with the costs of being poor should be required short-form nonfiction reading.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781668055601
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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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