Even on rereading, Talese’s work gets better, like fine wine.
Revisiting Gotham.
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,’’ Talese writes at the outset of his latest collection, a spirited compendium of pieces that deal with everything from the preferred habitations of the wild cats of Manhattan to the builders of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the social protocols of George Plimpton’s Paris Review set, and the kidnapping of mobster Joe Bonanno. It’s a bit of misdirection. Talese is nothing if not a noticer, focusing on the grainy details that distinguish journalism that aspires to literary art from dutiful wire service reports. The book shines with the love that the author, the son of an Atlantic City tailor, bears for his adopted home, giving E.B. White’s legendary ode, Here Is New York, a run for its money. Documenting his journalistic doggedness, the entries are preceded with reproductions of Talese’s original typescript, dotted with emendations and reminders of where he wants to take the tale. Much of this deeply reported material is repurposed from earlier pieces, often updated. For example, The Bridge, detailing how the Verrazano-Narrows structure championed by “master builder’’ Robert Moses forced Brooklynites from their Bay Ridge homes, was first published as a stand-alone volume in 1959. Here, it includes a preface for a new edition, released in tandem with the 50th anniversary of its opening. His understated portrait of Bill Bonanno, the ambivalent but dutiful son of the kidnapped mobster, is notable not only for its narrative, but the skill it took to gain access to this famously private circle. The collection includes Talese’s previously published iconic piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,’’ which appeared in his 2023 collection, Bartleby and Me. Despite that caveat, one must pay the nonagenarian auteur his due.
Even on rereading, Talese’s work gets better, like fine wine.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780063392182
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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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