Morbid, occasionally unpleasant, and a touch too earnest, but an evenhanded look at the end of life.
The sentimental education of a rural undertaker in all things mortuary.
“I wear many hats—ad hoc grave digger, obituary draftsman, liturgy organizer, headstone designer, community death mentor,” writes Sweeney. Young, pious, sober-minded, he opens on a rather unsettling note: the acts of embalming, sewing, applying makeup, and rendering a corpse to look as if in peaceful repose when, in fact, the death may have been quite grisly. “Half of my chosen profession is unseen,” Sweeney notes. All happens behind closed doors, in this case in a little farm town in northwestern Minnesota, where everyone knows everyone else and where a death goes noticed. Some of Sweeney’s narrative takes the form of a leisurely memoir, its pace befitting the rural setting; some of it reads like notes for a newcomer to the field: Use an “eye cap,” a contact lens–like thing with little burrs, to keep a customer’s eyelids from popping open—disconcerting indeed during a viewing—and keep the corpse’s mouth closed, against the old custom of leaving it open for a “natural, rested look”; if need be, suture the jaws or tie teeth together. Sweeney is candid about what brought him into the funeral business: He had good people skills (to communicate with the living, that is), he wanted meaningful work, and “he wanted a job that scratched the clerical itch, but also provided an income.” Bingo. Sometimes tending toward the preachy but seldom going far over the line, Sweeney writes of his work as a way of helping the web of life during “one final last moment of beauty before the thing held in its center fades from view,” which seems a noble thing indeed. Sweeney’s prose is pedestrian, but his account will satisfy the curiosity of anyone who wonders just what goes on beyond those closed doors.
Morbid, occasionally unpleasant, and a touch too earnest, but an evenhanded look at the end of life.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781668062111
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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