Another characteristic Kaplan travelogue, often both riveting and disheartening.
The veteran journalist and foreign affairs specialist tours the historic sea and delivers his usual penetrating observations.
Fans of Kaplan’s work have squirmed through his graphic Balkan Ghosts (1993) and absorbed astute analyses of today’s international relations in The Return of Marco Polo’s World (2018). Both books are key forerunners to this insightful take on the stormy history and geopolitics of nations bordering the Adriatic: Italy and Greece as well as Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, and Montenegro. Chronicling his travels up the Italian east coast through Rimini, Ravenna, Venice, and Trieste, he writes about many familiar elements of European history through the centuries, but these serve mostly as historical background for the author’s often insightful musings on Italian art, architecture, and literature. Absorbing Roman and then Byzantine culture, Christian Italy successfully fended off Islamic influences and has remained united for two centuries. Matters are different when Kaplan leaves Trieste and enters the nations formed when Yugoslavia disintegrated in 1991. An unhappy mixture of cultures, languages, and religions, the people of this region have passed more than 1,000 years divided among three empires—Habsburg, Venetian, and Ottoman—and retain bitter memories of their treatment under each one. Circling the Adriatic, Kaplan finally arrives in Corfu, an island within swimming distance of post-Stalinist Albania but vibrantly Greek. The author repeatedly points out that while Europe’s population is stagnant, population explosions in Africa will lead to further tumult involving economics, climate change, resources, and migration. “With Africa’s population set to climb over the course of the century from 1.1 billion to perhaps 3 or 4 billion,” writes Kaplan, “migration will be a permanent issue for a country like Croatia with a Mediterranean coastline and a negative birthrate.” Croatia is only one of many nations in the region that will face significant obstacles in the coming decades.
Another characteristic Kaplan travelogue, often both riveting and disheartening.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-399-59104-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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