An unsparing and heart-wrenching exploration of serious illness and its impact on everyone it touches.
An extended essay plumbs the effects of aging and illness on patient and caregivers alike.
“Mother was a smart, resourceful, attractive, tactless, competitive, and practical person.” Novelist and critic Tillman emphasizes these qualities of her mother’s to convey the shock she felt when, in 1995, she returned from a trip abroad to find her 86-year-old mother unusually passive and disheveled. After several tests, one doctor offered a diagnosis of normal pressure hydrocephalus, a condition virtually unknown then—and one that remains poorly understood today: “700,000 people in the United States are supposed to have hydrocephalus, but only 20 percent have been correctly diagnosed.” Tillman’s mother had a shunt implanted to drain excessive fluid from her ventricles. However, though this treatment is common and effective, it isn’t perfect; over 10 years, she would receive seven revisions. Tillman never shies away from the difficult realities of her mother’s illness nor from the fact that her mother was a harsh and narcissistic person all her life. She painstakingly catalogs the numerous challenges of illness, not only for the patient, but also for those around her, including the frustrations of finding good or even adequate care. Doctors and hospitals could be indifferent or unhelpful, particularly because her mother was elderly, and “the elderly especially are seen as dead weight to the medical industry.” Some of the most affecting passages are about caregivers, one of whom the family employed for a decade. Most often women of color and frequently undocumented, these women were crucial to her mother’s care and allowed her to maintain some measure of her own freedom, but their role, integral to the family’s functioning and yet still outsiders, proved difficult to navigate. Tillman’s detailed account will be enlightening to readers who, like her, had no idea how horrible these processes could be until she cared for someone who was sick and comforting to those who see themselves represented in such struggles.
An unsparing and heart-wrenching exploration of serious illness and its impact on everyone it touches.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-59376-717-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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