An emotionally and atmospherically deep celebration of a family that has stuck together through thin and thinner.
The Today Show host chronicles his family’s story through dark times and great obstacles.
Melvin looks back at his upbringing in Columbia, South Carolina, during the 1980s and 1990s. Though he focuses on his relationship with his father, many other members of his large family play important supporting roles in the memoir. Melvin is in his early 40s, but he has enough experience and wisdom to be able to see his father through a very different lens than when he was younger, when his father’s absences, sullenness, and emotional distance troubled him. Gradually, he learned that his father was a severe alcoholic—and not just an alcoholic, but addiction prone in general, as when he lost himself to video poker, “the crack cocaine of gambling” (now outlawed in the state), squandering much of his paycheck. Melvin has a canny way of putting readers in his younger shoes, capably demonstrating his confusion and need for approval and how these factors shaped his personality. He worked diligently to avoid his father’s fate and become a self-confident, communicative, empathetic adult. The author also fills in the background of the “soft racism” of Columbia and what it was like for a Black family to move across the river to downtown. Many members of his extended family move in and out of the narrative, each bringing their own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. But it all comes back to his Pops, and Melvin won’t settle for a simple answer: “hindered by his own family history, his own parents’ shortcomings and dearth of resources, his lack of a good role model…the systematic and overt racism he faced…the legacy of alcoholism—and likely an undiagnosed underlying depression.” As the author grappled with his family’s legacy, he devised his own philosophy about child rearing: “You want to make their path as smooth as possible, but without spoiling them rotten.”
An emotionally and atmospherically deep celebration of a family that has stuck together through thin and thinner.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-307199-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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