A few great essays can’t save a collection that tends toward the sentimental.
Women and nonbinary authors reflect on the music of the late Sinéad O’Connor.
When Irish singer-songwriter O’Connor died in 2023 at age 56, the music world was thrown into a state of shock. O’Connor was a global celebrity, and had been since the 1990 release of her hit single “Nothing Compares 2 U”—a cover of a previously obscure Prince song—two years before she would memorably tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. Huber and Bayne’s book collects essays by women and nonbinary authors reflecting on the singer’s influence on their own lives. The anthology kicks off with a foreword by fellow musician Neko Case, well written but a bit unfocused. The essays that follow, each tied to a specific O’Connor song, are a mixed bag. Standouts include Sarah Viren, who examines “Black Boys on Mopeds,” and May-lee Chai, who uses “Jump in the River” as a starting point to explore her relationship with her mother. Madhushree Ghosh does a good job writing about discovering O’Connor’s music as a 20-year-old whose Indian peers can’t quite relate, while Brooke Champagne writes a stunning piece about abortion inspired by “Three Babies.” In an essay tied to “Jackie,” Zoe Zolbrod, recalling the time she and a group of friends listened to the song at a gathering, successfully captures the effect O’Connor had on her fans: “We didn’t care if the whole building came tumbling down. We wanted it to. In those first moments, she made us feel powerful enough not just to stand our ground, but to fly.” There are some gems here, but too many of the essays lack focus and descend into the maudlin.
A few great essays can’t save a collection that tends toward the sentimental.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781668078334
Page Count: 256
Publisher: One Signal/Atria
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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