An offbeat, sometimes trenchant personal narrative about the value of joy.
The former radio-show host offers a book about finding cheer in everyday life.
“Dread is communicable,” writes Keillor at the beginning of his latest book. “Crap is bad for the brain.” This observation is part of the opening salvo from the creator of the syndicated Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companionand the author of many books. Keillor’s book is designed to recall the central and often overlooked value of good cheer in American life, which he characterizes as being in relatively short supply in the modern era. The idea to write a book about cheerfulness, he says, matured in his mind while he was recovering from successful heart surgery in 2022; the concept felt strange to him, like a non-skier writing about skiing: “I went through decades of busy striving and confusion and dissatisfaction,” he remembers, “and now I felt secure in my skis, looking down the steep chute, knees bent, leaning forward, pushing off.” The book’s narrative wanders through Keillor’s memories, pulling in a large cast of aunts, uncles, grandparents, old friends, and colleagues, as well as his parents, portrayed with the warm glow of settled love. It also includes helpings of Keillor’s famously deadpan doggerel poetry. His general observations are intertwined with frequent reflections (he reminds readers often that he’s 80). These memory-glimpses are drawn from his childhood and personal life, as well as his professional career; the latter came to an end with MPR in 2017, following allegations of inappropriate behavior with a female colleague. Keillor denied any wrongdoing, and in the book, he briefly characterizes the separation as the result of “a simple shakedown scheme by a man and woman who’d worked for the show for years.” (A 2018 MPR News feature later reported “a years-long pattern of behavior that left several women who worked for Keillor feeling mistreated, sexualized or belittled.”)
Readers who are nostalgic for A Prairie Home Companionmay be surprised by the valedictory tone of Keillor’s prose throughout this book. Every page feels like a farewell address, every observation is slightly pained, and every personal recollection reads like the last affectionate look-around of a man about to fall off a cliff. The Minnesota humor that permeates so much of Keillor’s earlier prose here feels not only dry, but also mordant. “Of course there’s loneliness and guilt, a sense of meaninglessness—you wonder: why am I here? What did I come in the kitchen looking for? Why am I holding a spatula?” goes one typical passage, at the end of which Keillor offers a plucky but grim punchline: “But the moment passes, thanks to memory loss.” The book has bits of the familiar hangdog humor for which the author was once famous (“It’s cold in Minnesota so I went into radio because it’s indoors and vacuum tubes gave off heat”), but they’re matched with tougher assertions (on quitting drinking: “The way to do it is to do it”) and comments on his acceptance of age: “The beauty of getting old is that I am no longer trying to find myself,” he writes. “I am here, this is me, forlorn mug and all.”
An offbeat, sometimes trenchant personal narrative about the value of joy.Pub Date: May 13, 2023
ISBN: 9798988281801
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Prairie Home Productions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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