A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.
A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.
As children, Brewer and her younger brother, Tomek, would peel sheets of skin off their fingers and palms—a sign of a vitamin deficiency—and compare who had torn off the most. They grew up in 1980s Poland, a country beset by political unrest and mired in an economic crisis. Store shelves were empty, fuel was scarce, and citizens queued for rations. Consequently, their family did what many rural Polish families have done for generations: forage for mushrooms and wild berries. “Mushroom hunting,” writes Brewer, “is a national sport in Poland.” She wonders whether her mercurial and alcoholic mother intentionally ate a poisonous mushroom to escape “a life she never wanted to live.” That suicide attempt was just one of many over the years. When things got too dicey at home, she and Tomek would walk to their grandparents’ house for food and love. “As with our beloved mushrooms,” writes the author, “my world was both toxic and lifegiving, and I learned to navigate Mother’s land mines, to receive her blows, and to recover on Grandma’s lap, regaining strength to weather the next family crisis.” Interspersed throughout the book are recipes from her childhood, including fish aspic, fermented rye soup, and bigos, a stew of sauerkraut, sausage, and, of course, mushrooms. Brewer’s psychic wounds may have not yet fully healed—“As wpadka, a birth-control accident, I will never know whether I was wanted”—but now a mother herself, she knows firsthand the demands of parenthood and how trauma passed down through generations can leave its mark. She can also recognize different sides of her mother: “her youthful enthusiasm, her love for animals, her sensitivity and creativity.”
A memorable meditation on hunger for food and love, childhood in a totalitarian regime, and resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780814258781
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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