Scholarship and memoir meld in a stimulating collection.
A Black feminist perspective on the arts, politics, and race.
Griffin, a 2021 Guggenheim fellow and professor of African American literature at Columbia, gathers essays, written over the past 30 years, that cohere to reveal her evolution as an insightful cultural critic and historian. The book’s title alludes to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, published in 1983, which Griffin read as a college student and which, she writes, “helped me to identify my intellectual calling” and inspired her appreciation of the essay as a literary form. Also deeply influential was Toni Morrison, whose works shaped her understanding “of history, narrative, power, domination, and language.” From Morrison’s work, Griffin came to understand that “mobility and migration were the dominant tropes of Black life in the modern world.” Among many essays on music, Griffin considers Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and three performers of the 1970s—Minnie Riperton, Syreeta Wright, and Deniece Williams—whose “ethereal, introspective, angelic voices” pointed to “a sense of healing and possibility.” Griffin also examines the cultural significance of Black women singers, such as Marian Anderson and Aretha Franklin, who have performed before audiences on momentous occasions—presidential inaugurations, the aftermath of disasters—“when the nation is trying to present an image of itself to itself and to the world.” Beyoncé falls into that category, singing the Etta James classic “At Last” at a ball celebrating the election of Barack Obama. That performance, and the election itself, inspires Griffin’s perceptive analysis of the relationship of Michelle Obama and Beyoncé to America’s racial history. Other essays include reflections on teaching online during the pandemic; the consequences of book banning; Hurricane Katrina, which exacerbated the “instability, insecurity, and disruption” that have blighted Black history; and the way difference has been “inscribed on the bodies of Black women.”
Scholarship and memoir meld in a stimulating collection.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9780393355772
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
SEEN & HEARD
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