A triumphant story of a long journey of self-acceptance.
An insightful, posthumously published memoir about alopecia and personal fulfillment.
Bailey, who died in 2015, wrote in this remembrance that she was in the midst of a stressful and financially devastating divorce in the early 1990s when her hair started to fall out—and it wasn’t the first time. Ever since she was 4, she’d had recurring bouts of patchy hair loss; when she was in high school in the ’80s, she was diagnosed with alopecia areata—an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack its own hair follicles. Her hair grew back after treatment, but by 1994, half of her hair was gone, and previously successful remedies weren’t working. She bought a $3,500 wig that looked so natural that no one, aside from close family members, knew of her hair loss. After earning an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and moving first to Louisville, Kentucky, then to Denver for a series of corporate jobs, she found good friends while running races and competing in triathlons. Alopecia remained her secret; the first person she told outside her family was a friend in Colorado who was facing hair loss from chemotherapy. Unfulfilled in work, she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Amapala, Honduras, leaving the wig behind and becoming “Pañuelo [Headscarf] Girl.” She still had negative feelings about what she saw as her “lumpy, hundred-and-sixty-eight-pound, size-twelve body,” and realized that becoming Pañuelo Girl was “about giving up the fear that surrounds being who I am.” Bailey described the everyday difficulties of living with alopecia, from the daily bombardment of advertisements featuring women with luxuriant hair to the discriminatory actions of an airline ticket agent, in relatable detail. She also wrote about her relationships with her ex-husband, parents, sister, and friends perceptively and openly. The story of Bailey’s Peace Corps experience, in particular, is an eye-opening read; the dismissive attitude of the mayor and municipal office at her first site is disheartening, but it makes her story of her successful organization of the Isla del Tigre Triatlón even more inspiring.
A triumphant story of a long journey of self-acceptance.Pub Date: April 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798281683753
Page Count: 318
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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