A comprehensive, must-have collector’s item for Cash completists.
Paying tribute to an expansive musical career.
Stielper, a Cash historian, artfully assembles the prolific singer’s decorated career through the songwriting that established him as an iconic force in country music. Fronting the book is an introduction from Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, who fondly reflects on his father’s legacy as an artist best known for his distinctive singing voice, but, noting that poetry and song were his lifeblood, “it was what that voice said” that had a lasting impact. John Carter shares obscure details about his father, including how, despite being functionally blind during the final few months of his life, he was still recording music 10 days before his death in 2003. Curating nearly 600 compositions, Stielper scoured Cash’s various homes to source material from diaries, notepads, and scrap-paper scribblings found in coat pockets, on tree bark, and even inside the singer’s tall black boots. Alongside Cash’s career evolution, the author fortifies the singer’s oeuvre with insightful essays noting how the unique eras and events occurring throughout Cash’s life defined his creative process and his music. The book begins in the 1940s with his first recordings and notes how his hardscrabble south-central Arkansas roots had an immense impact on his future songwriting and his worldview. Cash, who sang as a “way to get what was in my head out,” would emerge as an instant standout with music labels for his composing virtuosity. Early hits included “Cry Cry Cry,” “Hey, Porter!,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” and the iconic “I Walk the Line,” followed by peak success years from the 1960s through the 1980s. In this trove of song lyrics, Cash lore, images, and poetry, Stielper returns the Man in Black to center stage and crafts a posthumous legacy befitting a legend. For both newcomers and diehard fans, this anthology is an opportunity to experience, in the words of Cash’s son, “the very essence of his soul.”
A comprehensive, must-have collector’s item for Cash completists.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780316503549
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Voracious/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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