A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and “how utterly it rips apart our lives.”
An English professor employs his devotion to language to plumb the depths of unimaginable grief.
Porter bravely recounts the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of his wife, Claire, a “meticulous scholar” herself. In excruciatingly moving detail, the author describes how, after 27 years of marriage, his wife collapsed on an otherwise normal Wednesday, the victim of an aneurysm. “Young and resilient, the needle on her life span hardly past midway, Claire died abruptly, as though I had been absentminded or had left the gas stove on or the door open,” writes Porter. “I looked up from the morning paper and she was gone.” Throughout, the author looks directly at grief, without avoidance or rationalization, chronicling the countless memorable aspects of his gut-wrenching experience, from the warmth of Claire’s skin in the hospital to those who gratefully received his wife’s organ donations. Porter is erudite and lyrical—characteristics about which Claire playfully teased him ("Claire was never fooled by eloquence. She was too keen to be tricked by a pretty sentence”)—and he couches his thoughts in something of a memory palace and ruminations on celestial bodies. He also sends his most difficult thoughts out into the void in the form of “Space Boy,” an imagined version of himself that is free to roam the cosmos looking for Claire. It’s to the author’s credit that none of these high-literary elements blunt or mitigate the trauma portrayed here, which is tough to digest, even on the page. Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind. “Obviously the dead don’t need or want our grief,” writes the author. “They’re busy with other things, have a whole new set of rules. It’s the living—we poor naked wretches—teeming clueless over this planet.”
A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and “how utterly it rips apart our lives.”Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61775-907-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Gracie Belle/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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