A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence.
A meditative history of mass murder by gunfire.
Freelance journalist McGraw begins in 1966, when a former Marine climbed a tower at the University of Texas and began firing. When he was finally brought down after murdering 17 people, he was said to have had a brain tumor—though that did not prevent the shooter from amassing an arsenal and planning his spree. Of all the mass killings since—Columbine, Christchurch, Parkland, the list goes on—there are, notes the author, only a few points in common. Though assaults by gun are fewer than by fists or knives, “when an active shooter—and it is most often a male—does get his hands on a semiautomatic rifle, the results are catastrophic.” The string of catastrophes that McGraw chronicles ends with a shooting from a Las Vegas hotel window “a hundred feet higher than the Texas shooter” in which an astonishing 471 people were hit with bullets and 102 died. That shooter—McGraw is scrupulous, with a couple of willful exceptions, about not naming names, denying killers the publicity they crave—was not, strictly speaking, insane. He may have been evil, but that is an amorphous, fairly useless concept that helps remove agency. What can be said about the killers in general is that they’re psychologically troubled and make their troubles known before they act, oftentimes only to be ignored. One young man who slaughtered 26 people, many of them schoolchildren, was diagnosed with numerous mental health issues, yet his mother, a gun enthusiast, bought him weapon after weapon. She was the first to die. The ease with which such guns can be acquired (2 million have entered the market since the Newtown massacre) is one of many seemingly intractable problems. That, along with a would-be killer’s sense of entitlement, contributes to a legacy of incomprehensible violence, of which McGraw writes, with grim poetry, “There is no silence on earth deeper than the silence between gunshots.”
A memorable, necessary contribution to the national conversation on gun violence.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1718-1
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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