Provocative, arguable, written with both bravado and great care: an exemplary collection.
Incisive reportage on Black life and history by the noted journalist.
Dean of journalism at Columbia, Cobb has a pronounced contrarian bent: He refuses, for one, to capitalize “Black,” writing, “Our existence as a community need not be premised on the canards of charlatans seeking to justify murder and slavery. The bonds of shared history and culture will suffice. In short, black people exist; Black people need not.” For another, he takes a pin to many a thought balloon, as in the idea that Barack Obama represented a post-racial America, noting archly, “Unlike the maligned mulattoes of old, Obama wasn’t passing for white—he was passing for mixed.” A case in point is Rodney King, savagely beaten by Los Angeles cops; days of rioting followed, police reforms were promised, but in the end nothing substantial changed. Cobb visits various points in American history, more often than not to find them wanting: His assessment of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, squares with historical critics who “undercut the inane idea that the formerly enslaved owed him anything at all, even a thank-you, for his self-interested decision to end a practice that the nation should never have begun in the first place.” The touchstones continue: Colin Kaepernick may have been brave for protesting system violence against Blacks, but he still wanted to play football in a league complicit in that oppression; the 2018 electoral campaign pitting Stacey Abrams against Brian Kemp, marked by extreme voter suppression, is proof by his lights that “most elections are framed as a referendum on the future; Georgia’s race was about how much of the past had been dragged into the present.” Cobb’s remarks on the intertwining of journalism and history are invaluable, while his account of inequalities of health care and its list of victims within the Black cultural community is harrowing.
Provocative, arguable, written with both bravado and great care: an exemplary collection.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593978207
Page Count: 448
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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
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