Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.
Recent essays by the acclaimed novelist on art, feminism, censorship, inspirations, and her own work.
Atwood’s third collection of essays, reviews, speeches, and book introductions covers work from 2004 to 2021, during which time she cemented her place as a literary legend. Her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, became an established classic, a hit TV series, and, as the Trump years neared and then arrived, troublingly prescient. In multiple essays, Atwood discusses that novel’s inspiration, creation, and influence—and how she came to write its 2019 sequel, The Testaments. In the context of that book and others (particularly her climate novels), this collection is marked both by her ongoing concern with the ethical and moral issues her fiction raises and an appealing flexibility in terms of subject matter. She treats keynote-speech invitations as opportunities to research subjects she otherwise might not. At a conference for nurses, she explored the distinctions between compassion and empathy, and at a gathering of neurologists, the role of the brain in fiction. Still, there are certain themes to which the author consistently returns. Literary inspirations are key, from fellow Canadians like Alice Munro to feminist polestars like Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin to canonized authors like Shakespeare, whom she discusses with particular attention and verve in multiple pieces. (Most of them touch on her 2016 novel, Hag-Seed, a reimagining of The Tempest.) The cyclical nature of crises is another theme. In the context of The Handmaid’s Tale and Covid-19, Atwood writes eloquently about how misogynist and epidemiological crises have habitually repeated themselves throughout history. Resistance to censorship informs many of these pieces, though the author also pushes back against the kind of groupthink that demands writers always be political spokespersons. Throughout, her tone is sprightly and informed; only an essay from the perspective of an extraterrestrial from planet Mashupzyx feels half-baked.
Smart and concerned essays and arguments from an author whose global concerns haven’t flagged.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54748-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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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