A thoughtful memoir brimming with marvelous anecdotes.
Burns retells his father’s remembrance of his first year at Boston University in 1947 and the two extraordinary foreign students he roomed with.
Bernard J. Burns—much to his chagrin, he was eternally called Buddy—was born in 1929, a “veritable Depression baby”; the gloomy time hung over his entire childhood like a storm cloud. When he matriculated at Boston University in 1947, admitted on an academic scholarship, he was given an opportunity to begin anew—to refashion himself and attempt to convince people to refer to him as anything other than Buddy. In addition to the daunting nature of the big city (Buddy grew up in Worcester), he was surrounded by older students, veterans of the war, and men who had killed other men in combat; it was an intimidating experience for a 17-year-old boy of provincial origins, a predicament thoughtfully rendered by the author, Buddy’s son. Buddy was fortunate enough to make good friends with two of his roommates, both foreigners, and years later he regaled his son with the fascinating stories of their exploits. Pong Sarisin hailed from Thailand, born into one of the most prominent families in the country (the “Kennedys of Thailand”). His father was the nation’s secretary of state at the time, and his fiancee was the daughter of the prime minister. Fernando Uribe Senior was born in Medellin, Colombia, and his father, Eduardo, founded the newspaper El Diario, a liberal publication that agitated for reform. Buddy’s time with his two foreign friends supplied the kind of education a university curriculum never could—at one point, Pong took him to meet a prince, who turned out to be Prince Bhumibol Adulyadej, the grandson of King Chulalongkorn, “who spent four decades modernizing Siam.”
Burns’ recounting of his father’s stories can be a bit long-winded and personally idiosyncratic—as he admits, these are reports of “an old man’s recollections of life as he knew it,” and they often read precisely as such, even though they are gently dramatized. Still, he intelligently captures a pivotal time in the history of the university, in which it was flooded by soldiers cashing in their GI Bills and changing the landscape of collegiate life forever. Pong and “Ferdie,” as Buddy called him, are two utterly captivating characters, excitingly exotic to Buddy at the time and both caught up in the political tumult of their nations in a way Buddy was not. (Pong’s father led an uprising against the prime minister, and disappeared for a time in the chaos.) Ferdie would become a prominent politician in Colombia and was eventually assassinated by the drug cartels he refused to bow down to. What emerges from this personal narrative is a powerful demonstration of the fact that the immigrants who come to America to work and to live are more often than not motivated by the same aspirations as their native-born counterparts, and often bring with them far more experience and maturity than their new countrymen. “Some, like Pong and Ferdie, are sent here from families that are truly prominent in their necks of the woods, and the American education will enable them to return to pick up the banners and run with them,” Burns writes. “They sit fearlessly in the crosshairs of history.” This is a captivating remembrance, packed with historical and cultural insight.
A thoughtful memoir brimming with marvelous anecdotes.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798338522271
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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