Friendly, personal essays in the Jean Shepherd mold.
A warm collection from a writer who loves to play with words.
The prolific, opinionated humorist Epstein offers up yet another collection of essays, from 1978 to 2023, starting off with a wry piece on the significance of jokes—“punch lines from jokes rattle around quite comfortably” in his head “alongside lines of poetry”—followed by an essay on letters—“I adore mail”—followed by a lovely survey of same in literature. He’s as adept at discussing juggling as he is at doing it, and, generally speaking, he believes there are “not two but four kinds of generalization.” The typical Epstein essay is besotted with aphorisms, his and others’. In “This Sporting Life,” this “couch athlete” proclaims his desire “to free myself of my bondage to watching sports.” Epstein easily slides from topic to topic: friendships, being a good guy, the seven deadly sins, especially gluttony, ex-smoker Epstein on smoking, fame, hats, envy (he’s desirous to have a “good name among a select audience of the genuinely thoughtful”), blurbs (“my blurbs truly aren’t worth dying for”), cats or dogs, and short men and women. On aging, he wrote at 50 that he hoped to reach “ninety-seven” (he’s now 86) but sadly confesses he probably won’t “write a novel as long and as good as Proust’s.” Epstein’s effusive about his love of reading. As a young man he began reviewing books for pay—“exhilarating.” In “The Bookish Life,” all “means and no end,” he heaps praise on Willa Cather—the “greatest twentieth-century American novelist.” He closes with a rather censorious essay on taste, confessing to not liking tattoos, rap music, and the inauthentic Bob Dylan, letting him “blow in his own rather pretentious wind.”
Friendly, personal essays in the Jean Shepherd mold.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781668009727
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.
The Top Chef host describes her journey to new heights.
For those who don’t know, Kish is a “gay Korean adopted woman, born in Seoul, raised in Michigan” and “a chef, a character, a host, and a cultural communicator—as well as a human being with a beating heart.” Though this book covers every step of her journey, every restaurant job and television role, and also discusses her experience as an adoptee (very positive) and a queer woman (late bloomer), the storytelling is so straightforward, lacking in suspense, character development, or dialogue, that it is basically a long version of its (longish) “About the Author.” Seemingly dramatic situations are not dramatized—when she was eliminated on her first Top Chef run, she assures us that she did the best she could, and drops it. “I can spare you the gory details (bouillabaisse and big personalities were involved).” Later, she cites a belief in protecting the privacy of others to omit the story of her first relationship with a woman. With no character development, neither does the reader get to know those who fall outside the privacy zone, like her best friend, Steph, and her wife, Bianca. When she gets mad, she says things like, “It’s a gross understatement to say I was crushed, beyond frustrated, and furious with the situation.” The fact that “I’ve never been a big reader” does not come as a surprise. It is more surprising when she confesses that “I believe the universe is selective about the moments in which it introduces life-changing prospects.”
Top Chef fans might savor this detailed account, but others will find it bland.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780316580915
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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