A poignant historiography of Anne Frank’s writing and the author’s response to it.
A writer reflects on Anne Frank’s diary, attentive to its ongoing significance for the world.
In her 2022 novel Reeling, French author Lafon explored the lives of young female dancers in the 1980s, exploited by middle-aged men purporting to help them, and the aftermath of their abuse. In her 2016 novel The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, she wrote a fictional account of gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s childhood in Romania, which ends with the gold medalist’s daring defection to the U.S. Here, Lafon explores the circumstances surrounding another young woman in peril: the writer Anne Frank. Blending historical fact, interviews, Frank’s writing, and personal rumination, the book chronicles a night that Lafon spends at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, with full access to its exhibits and the annex where the Franks lived in secret for two years evading the Nazis. Lafon is unflinching in her observations of the museum—“Everything here wants to be as authentic as possible, and yet none of it is, except for this oppressive feeling of absence”—and in her questions: “When did Otto Frank finally realize that the faith he had placed in their adoptive country was a tragic mistake?” One of the most striking revelations is how normal the Franks’ lives seemed shortly before they went into hiding—Anne posed with her sister at the beach for a photo—and how that sense of normalcy was something they strived to maintain—Anne pinned her favorite film stars to the walls in the annex—as their world unraveled. We learn that after the Nazis captured the Franks, it was Miep Gies, one of Otto’s employees, who not only cared for them while they hid, but who, at great personal risk, saved Anne Frank’s diary from being destroyed. The Franks’ story and the author’s quest to investigate her own experience intertwine to create a testament to the power of words.
A poignant historiography of Anne Frank’s writing and the author’s response to it.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780300275889
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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