A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.
The acclaimed farmer, novelist, and environmental essayist considers—and grumbles about—our current racial reckonings.
Berry has been writing about race for much of his career. His 1970 book, The Hidden Wound, considered the impact of slavery and its aftereffects on the country in general and his native Kentucky in particular. In essence, his approach hasn’t changed. He still advocates for tightknit communities that are, if not actively agrarian, at least compassionate toward the environment; from there, he suggests, balms to many social ills will naturally arrive. This digressive, at times exhausting book is at best a well-meaning, eloquent utopian plea to abandon urbanity; at worst, it lapses into all-lives-matter rhetoric insisting that slavery and the Confederacy, while wrongheaded, were misunderstood. Berry finds recent efforts to remove Confederate monuments to be unhelpful, leading to an extended consideration of Robert E. Lee as “one of the great tragic figures of our history, who embodied and suffered in his personal life our national tragedy.” The author also argues that most Confederate soldiers were not necessarily White supremacists but rather unfairly maligned just-following-orders types. “Whatever there may have been of kindness in slavery does not excuse it,” he writes later, “and whatever was most cruel does not typify it.” In his effort to seek nuance in racial divisions, Berry risks being misunderstood, which he acknowledges. The deeper problem is that he cherry-picks where he goes looking for nuance. He laments the Great Migration without considering its causes; curiously, mentions Jim Crow only in passing; and laments the loss of Confederate statues but doesn’t consider the option of elevating other communities in their places. The hardworking Amish farm he describes certainly sounds lovely, but his prescription that we somehow build a country from that kind of model is as impractical as any bureaucratic approach he has railed against in the past.
A rambling and frustrating book from a normally reliable author.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-8-9856798-0-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Shoemaker & Company
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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