A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.
A political, personal, and immensely readable collection about the intermingling of fantasy and reality.
With brilliant insight and masterful writing, Villarreal examines fantasy at close range, blending personal essay with intellectual criticism. The author ranges widely, examining racism, her childhood as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, the gender performances of Kurt Cobain and Selena, and the fraught circumstances of her divorce. At the heart of the narrative is a significant question: “What does the constant state of loss after colonization, enslavement, and dispossession do to the collective imagination?” Furthermore, who has the privilege of imagination, and how does that shape our collective reality? In this memorable narrative, fantasy is involved in many different things: the video game where becoming a witcher is a means to heal after the betrayal of divorce; the Sphinx Gate in The Neverending Story; the American dream, “a fairy tale, after all”; Villareal’s search for her grandmother’s records, lost from national archives due to gendered violence; movies in which an all-white cast is still the norm; the author’s own mental health struggles; and Latine writers being forced to carry the label “magical realism” no matter their genre. Where there is fantasy, there is also magic, and the magic of this collection is the elasticity and brilliance with which Villarreal is able to take critical analysis and connect it to her own experiences. Magic itself, as the author indicates, is often treated as “a feminized, infantilized, racialized practice done by primitive or unwell people, despite its history in the healing arts. Ancestral knowledge is reduced to ‘magic’ to strip it of legitimacy, shamed, ridiculed, or framed as dangerous because it is how disempowered people…have historically healed, rebelled, and reclaimed their narratives.” Villareal expertly reclaims those narratives here.
A wondrous book that will change the way you think about fantasy and magic.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593187142
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tiny Reparations
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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