A deferential, unsentimental portrait that ably captures Stephansson’s life and legacy.
Hreinsson (The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 1997, etc.) translates and abridges his award-winning two-volume biography of Icelandic émigré poet Stephan G. Stephansson.
Born in 1853, Stephansson is introduced as a freethinking poet, pioneer, farmer and naturalist whose strong leftist politics grew following his immigration to America, in 1873, and later to Canada, where he spent over half of his life. After an enigmatic foreward by John Ralston Saul about Canada’s cultural legacy, in addition to remarks from the poet’s grandson, who supported and financed publication, the author includes a brief history of Iceland—a welcome beginning for those unfamiliar with the fjords, volcanic eruptions, ancient forests and dispersed, pious, agrarian people of the Nordic island during 19th and early 20th centuries. Hreinsson, writing “from an Icelandic point of view,” convincingly shows how his and Stephansson’s home country—with its rich mythology, respect for nature and pastoral literary tradition—shaped “Stephan G.’s” poetry. Still, the Icelandic universe can be difficult to navigate: Young Stephan had an aunt named Helga, who had a daughter, Sigridur, and another first cousin named Helga Sigridur, whom Stephan later marries. The core source material is Stephansson’s verse and correspondence to and from the poet, which Hreinsson translates and incorporates into the text to varying effect. Biographical notation and excerpts illuminate the braiding of Stephansson’s agricultural and literary work, while providing a feeling of coevolving with the poet. In addition to the language barrier, the biography is littered with indefinites—“probably,” “might,” “likely,” “seems” and “we can imagine”—and the author sometimes obfuscates his sources. Yet the man who emerges from this portrait is complicated and real. Hreinsson’s Stephansson is proud, questioning and sagacious—an Icelandic heir to Emerson, Whitman or Thoreau. Perhaps the book’s most noticeable misstep, though, is its inconsistent description of the poet’s apostasy, his conviction that women should have equal rights, and his self-identification as “a Non-Partisan, a Socialist, a Bolshevik.”
A deferential, unsentimental portrait that ably captures Stephansson’s life and legacy.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0973365726
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Benson Ranch Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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