A charming book that’s guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS.
A marketing whiz, waylaid by the pandemic, becomes a rural mailman in this winning memoir.
“I am behind schedule and this route is almost sixty miles long,” writes Grant early in his memoir. That route snakes out from Blacksburg, Virginia, one of the most technologically sophisticated cities in the nation; by its end, on unmaintained roads past sad trailer parks and weathered farmhouses, it’s a different world. Indeed, one of his first customers takes delivery of a sword paid for with his second pandemic check, a replica of “the blade that smote Sauron.” Another stop on his route leaves coffee in the mailbox for him in the freezing Appalachian winter, while Grant slugs down Gatorade in the boiling summer and advises cutting it in half with water, “because it’s actually too salty right out of the bottle.” That’s not the only bit of wisdom Grant dispenses: “If you think your letter carrier isn’t keeping a list of who’s naughty and nice, you are not living in reality.” Grant also observes the reality that few delivery people last long in the job: where the average on-the-job annual injury rate is 2.8 for every 100 employees, it’s 7 for postal workers, thanks to dogs, bees, weather, and off-kilter people. But, Grant adds, there are pleasures to the job, too, from seeing beautiful countryside to doing a public service: “When I carried the mail I was never just me, but something much larger.” Along the way, Grant muses about rural poverty, fractious politics, violence, drug abuse, and other issues, but he peppers his prose with funny aperçus: “It’s always the small dogs that start shit….When the universe arrives at its heat death, there will be nothing left but unread issues of the Economist….Our delivery vehicles were like democracy, the worst of all possible vehicles, except for the alternatives.”
A charming book that’s guaranteed to make you think differently about the USPS.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668018040
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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