O'Brien's warm, witty voice will bring a wide audience to her world-class adventures.
A record-setting mountaineer chronicles her ascents, near misses, and challenges, not all on mountains.
In her debut, O'Brien deftly spins the story of how she lost her high-powered corporate job and decided to climb Mount Everest. Despite hair-raising obstacles and frozen body parts littering the trail, she succeeded and gradually moved into the highest ranks of mountaineering. Readers will be thrilled by her accounts of climbing the Seven Summits, the highest mountains on each continent, achieving the Explorers' Grand Slam after skiing to both the North and South poles. She was the first British and American woman (dual citizenship) to conquer K2, arguably the most dangerous mountain in the world, and in 2013, she became the first woman to complete the Grand Slam in less than one year. Throughout the book, the author provides well-fleshed characterizations of guides, fellow travelers (some of whom become dear friends, some total jerks), and one fine fellow she calls Spousey. O’Brien teaches us about the tedium involved in the process of acclimatizing to high altitudes, spending months in base camps hiking up and down, and she parcels out the painful details of her childhood at the hands of careless parents, crediting those experiences with bolstering her independence and inner strength. This backstory contains a black hole that she avoids fully explaining for much of the narrative, adding tension to the procession of summits, stories that become somewhat repetitive by the end of the book. Nonetheless, O'Brien pours her unflagging energy and hard-won life wisdom into every aspect of her book—even the epigraphs for each chapter are excellent—and her prose is commendably free of clichés and full of wit. All of these elements combine to make a vicariously engaging addition to the literature on mountaineering as well as a beacon of inspiration in these dark times.
O'Brien's warm, witty voice will bring a wide audience to her world-class adventures.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982123-78-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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