A whirlwind, at times overly manic, journey through a producer’s very full discography.
The iconic dance and hip-hop producer recalls his greatest hits and worst habits.
Few artists did more to define the sound of club music in the ’80s than Baker, who produced canonical rap tracks like Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” dance classics like Freeez’s “I.O.U.,” and remixes for Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, and Hall & Oates that brought house and electro to the suburbs. It was an odd feat for a self-described quiet Jewish boy from the Boston suburbs. But a gift for blending a variety of sounds, as well as for managing multiple personalities, made him a go-to producer and remixer through that decade and beyond. Indeed, one shortcoming of this book is that Baker was often juggling so many projects simultaneously that he gives only so much space on the page to each one. But he’s candid about how dependent he was on cocaine to get all that work done, and about which artists enabled his habit more than others. (New Order helped push him off the wagon not once but twice.) Baker’s clubland success opened doors for him in the rock and R&B worlds, and he’s especially proud of his production work with Bob Dylan and his ringleading “(Ain’t Gonna Play) Sun City,” a 1985 anti-apartheid anthem featuring dozens of rock, pop, hip-hop, and R&B stars. Though he’ll occasionally call out a difficult artist, Baker is usually praiseful of his musical collaborators. (Businesspeople are a different matter, especially when he tried launching a London soul-food restaurant, which opened on 9/11.) The speed-run approach of the memoir can be frustrating because it reveals little about him personally (one divorce is literally relegated to a parenthetical); now sober, he’s kept busy long after many of his contemporaries flamed out. How he did it remains relatively obscure.
A whirlwind, at times overly manic, journey through a producer’s very full discography.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780571387427
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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