A candid, practical, and often inspiring guidebook.
Maryland state Sen. McCray combines a personal account with an instruction manual, building a case for apprenticeships in financially disadvantaged communities.
Across 11 chapters, the author presents episodes from his troubled youth in Baltimore with clear guidance on apprenticeships. He explains how his own time as an apprentice with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers labor union paved the way for his later success as an electrician, entrepreneur, and state legislator—first as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from 2015 to 2019, and as a state senator since 2019. McCray frames his book as an “intentional disruption of a failing system”; in it, he advocates for practical, hands-on education that can have immediate financial benefits. Raised in East Baltimore, McCray spent his teenage years selling drugs and cycling through various schools and juvenile facilities. When he found an apprenticeship, however, he knew that “in an instant, a much better way to earn and learn appeared.” Each chapter begins with a difficult moment from his youth—fighting, aimlessly drifting through school, having brushes with gun violence—before discussing how he transformed the lessons he learned into positive traits. He recounts how union mentors and instructors taught him professionalism and investment strategies, and each section strives to provide direct advice, concluding with lesson checklists that range from the importance of getting a driver’s license to how to prepare for interviews. The book also offers detailed financial breakdowns of investments that are within anyone’s reach. Later chapters aim to help readers to identify beneficial programs and explain policy changes that the author has pursued as a legislator to expand them.
McCray’s work succeeds, in large part, due to his straightforward, accessible style. He writes with a clarity that makes complex systems feel approachable, and his critique of the “suffocating debt” of four-year colleges and presentation of trades as viable paths to success puts a broad policy debate at the heart of the book, which will attract readers interested in education issues. McCray writes directly to young people who grew up in difficult situations, and he’s strikingly forthcoming as he revisits the hardest parts of his own past, recounting violent encounters, robberies, and the ins and outs of Baltimore’s most notorious drug market. When he casually references “members of a gang that I was beefing with,” it feels like lived experience, not like the bromides of a politician, which gives his encouragement extra heft. At times, sudden transitions between the stories and the instructional passages result in a choppy reading experience: “The ways that people get into and out of the drug game are different for everyone. Similarly, the doors to apprenticeships can be different.” Still, the book’s consistently matter-of-fact tone never feels artificial; instead, it allows for the clear delivery of strong, practical solutions, as well as actionable advice to put those solutions to use. There’s also a detailed list of further resources available nationwide, and a breakdown, by industry, of various apprenticeships with potential.
A candid, practical, and often inspiring guidebook.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781636986890
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
