Delightful encounters with passionate readers.
What New Yorkers read.
Making an appealing book debut, Beutter Cohen, a documentarian and creator of the Subway Book Review, gathers excerpts from more than 160 conversations she had while riding every subway line in New York City. The subway, she writes, is “the city’s beating heart that never stops.” When she noticed someone reading, she became an inquiring reporter, asking why they had chosen a particular book, eager to learn about them as a reader, and she also took photos of each person holding their book of choice. Themes of race, sexuality, the environment, food, power, history, art, music, home, love—and living in New York—emerged as widely diverse readers talked about an equally diverse selection of books. “I saw bestselling novels, experimental poetry collections, self-help books brimming with sticky notes, provocative memoirs, and well-loved classics,” Beutter Cohen observes. The books mostly fall into the category of serious literature, no matter what genre. Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand bookstore, was reading Roxane Gay’s Hunger. Beutter Cohen noticed Gay herself at the 23rd Street Station in Manhattan, reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, which, Gay says, is a novel she has read at least seven times. Singer/songwriter Sophie Auster discussed Memories of the Future, by her mother, Siri Hustvedt. A reader who identifies as nonbinary chose Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Some readers Beutter Cohen met are immigrants, and their choice of books reflected feelings of exile and loss. A young woman from Southern India, living alone because her husband was deported, found comfort in Vivian Gornick’s The Odd Woman and the City, which spoke to her own loneliness. Qween Jean, a self-described “Caribbean goddess,” read Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (“hella Black, hella feminine, and hella powerful”). Some readers were transplants from other parts of the country, as is Beutter Cohen. “A small town girl from Germany,” she lived on the West Coast before moving to New York in 2013. A list of the books mentioned is appended.
Delightful encounters with passionate readers.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982145-67-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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
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