An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.
From the wilderness of Colorado, two writers share their anxieties and hopes.
In late March, Houston and Irvine began writing to each other from their homes on opposite sides of the San Juan Mountains. What started as a contribution to Orion magazine’s online pandemic series continued, resulting in a collection, gracefully illustrated by Taylor, that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times. Both women are “intensely aware” that they write from a place of privilege: “two healthy white women in respectful, loving relationships who have the enormous privilege of doing meaningful work from home, with plenty of food socked away and some of the most beautiful and accessible wildlands all around.” Yet despite their good fortune, they reveal past wounds and present challenges. For example, both had abusive fathers and mothers who said they regretted having them; both have scar tissue in their lungs from pneumonia and high altitudes, making them particularly vulnerable to Covid-19. Irvine has a daughter who suffers from epilepsy and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder. “What I know for sure,” she writes, “is that privilege doesn’t spare you from trauma, although it can lessen the blow, and the aftermath.” Motherhood, womanhood, work, and nature recur as themes, as does frustration with Donald Trump and with neighbors who vehemently refuse to wear masks. “I watch this administration attack and destroy every single thing that brings me joy,” Houston writes, “air and water, sure, trees and animals, every slice of wildness we have left, but also the arts, education, diversity itself, Amtrak, solar power, the post office.” They wonder if post-pandemic life will be different. “Battling for a better world is the only occupation now,” notes Houston, “and it is women’s turn to lead the charge, maybe with a few good men in tow.”
An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948814-38-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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