Fans of the Wild West and its pistol-packin’ miscreants will enjoy Clavin’s latest.
A rollicking tale of a Texas lawman and the iron-jawed contingent that rode with him.
Before there were the Texas Rangers, writes Clavin, an old hand at popular Western history, there were other rangers, assembled and deputized mostly to kill Native Americans and Mexicans. One early band “were not technically Rangers but pretty much served as such until Stephen Austin gave them a name.” As Clavin notes, the Mexicans who first allowed the Anglos to settle in Texas soon came to regret the decision. Whereas they had hoped that the new settlers would constitute a buffer between them and raiding Apaches and Comanches, they saw that the newcomers “were not adhering to Catholicism and continued to own slaves,” both violations of Mexican law. The author doesn’t soft-pedal the racist ethos surrounding the Rangers, but neither does he paint a heroic portrait of the likes of Travis and Crockett or the free-shooting pacifiers of the borderlands. One most effective of these early groups was a troop led by a Confederate veteran named Leander McNelly, who lived out a long life enforcing the law on the frontier in parallel with more organized police forces until finally being folded into the Texas Rangers in 1874. McNelly had plenty of scrapes and adventures, and he wasn’t shy about crossing into Mexico, violating international law, when the occasion suited him. Among the most noir of his bêtes noires was the outlaw John Wesley Hardin, who makes a much more interesting figure overall than McNelly. It took years to bring Hardin, elusive and seemingly impervious to bullets until his last moments, to justice, a story that takes up many pages here. McNelly, for his part, helped shape the Texas Rangers into a formidable force, and, as Clavin notes, he was acknowledged as such by being “a member of the first class inducted into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame” decades after his death.
Fans of the Wild West and its pistol-packin’ miscreants will enjoy Clavin’s latest.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781250214553
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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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