by Bill Belichick ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2025
Professional advice—and a handful of interesting stories—from a gridiron champion.
Up your game, even if it’s not football.
Belichick coached the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl wins, but here he targets readers in less glamorous fields. “You know the feeling of settling back at your desk and opening your email after a long vacation?” he writes. NFL coaches do—every summer when training camp starts. Belichick encourages us to view such workplace challenges as opportunities to outmaneuver competitors. “Adversity is universal,” he writes on one of several pages reserved for a few words in huge, all-caps text. “Get over yours before the other person gets over theirs.” He shares numerous football stories, several of them compelling. In 1975, he worked for no pay for the Baltimore Colts, snapping the ball in practice to the team’s quarterback and shadowing Coach Ted Marchibroda—“a graduate-level tutorial in QB coaching.” His Patriots anecdotes are mostly paeans to great players and overachieving low-draft picks. Tom Brady was both. Belichick prefaces a story about his longtime quarterback as “one I’ve never told before.” Alas, it’s a toothless yarn about Brady’s self-confidence. Outside the lines, Belichick admires—and serially cites—prominent CEOs and financiers who’ve been glorified in other books. Belichick’s dry humor lifts otherwise pedestrian sections about workplace communication and taking on new roles, and he owns some of his missteps, among them his failure to draft future MVP Lamar Jackson as Brady’s successor. Curiously, Belichick finds time to remark on Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show “wardrobe malfunction,” yet the biggest controversies of his tenure—Deflategate and the arrest (and eventual murder conviction) of one of his players, Aaron Hernandez—go unmentioned. Instead, there are platitudes on how to “take positive steps to affect change” and “win as a team.”
Professional advice—and a handful of interesting stories—from a gridiron champion.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781668080832
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton
BOOK REVIEW
by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton
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46
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New York Times Bestseller
by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
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46
Our Verdict
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
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