A compelling, honest, and ultimately victorious memoir.
Ito offers a soul-searching memoir about the lasting effects of childhood emotional neglect.
In 2013, the author experienced intensifying conflicts with Peter, her pathologist husband, and David, her teenage son, compelling her to question whether she had put her troubled upbringing behind her. Born in 1961 in Sagamihara, Japan, Ito was the youngest of three children in a family described by friends as “barabara,” a Japanese word meaning “separate, scattered, broken up, torn, or ripped apart.” Her father, a workaholic surgeon who had founded a hospital, and her mother, who was involved with social organizations and devoted to shopping and partying, were rarely home and had a fraught relationship. (Ito was primarily brought up by surrogate caregivers.) A summer spent abroad in Napa, California, in 1977 was revelatory; the Schmidt family, who hosted her, was close and loving—everything hers was not. In 1979, the author was committed to the psychiatric unit at the Yokohama Harbor Medical Center, diagnosed with “stress-induced psychosomatic disorder” due to emotional neglect. While working on her doctorate in education at Stanford in 1993, she met Peter, whom she married in 1995—David was born in 1997. In the 2010s, pressures exacerbated by their laissez-faire parenting style, David’s teenage mood swings and complicated romantic entanglements, Ito’s menopause, and an imbalance in the spouses’ sex drives nearly caused the family to implode before psychological and emotional counseling helped the author to repair her relationships with her husband, son, and herself. Ito moves from adulthood to childhood and back again in nonchronological chapters that insightfully juxtapose her lives in Japan and the United States. Her descriptions of her lonely family life in Japan and of her mother’s obsessive shopping and hoarding illustrate that no culture is exempt from dysfunctional families. Her self-appraisals can be funny, as when she is berated by a stranger (as an adult) for talking on the train in Japan: “It made me wonder if my blabbermouth provoked males to explode in anger.”
A compelling, honest, and ultimately victorious memoir.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781647429805
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 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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