Moylan gives the flawed, delightfully weird reality series the flawed, delightfully weird history it deserves.
Behind the scenes of one of TV’s most absurd spectacles.
Any history of the Real Housewives franchise would have to be messy. This inconsistent account certainly embodies that odd legacy. Sometimes, Moylan’s writing is gloriously entertaining, especially in his recaps of classic moments from Housewives history—e.g., Teresa Giudice flipping tables or Aviva Drescher removing her artificial leg and tossing it into the middle of “famed New York eatery Cipriani.” Here’s how Moylan, a self-described “Real Housewives anthropologist” who has been recapping the show for more than a decade for Gawker and Vulture, describes Atlanta Housewife Kim Zolciak before she battles frenemy NeNe Leakes: “She’s also sporting a cheaper wig than usual, her original nose, and lips without the filler that would turn them into balloon animals.” Sometimes, Moylan takes interesting detours into the online world of Housewives fans, real-life encounters at the BravoCon convention, or a Puerto Vallarta Hyatt for “Vacation With Vicki,” a weekendlong event with Orange County Housewife Vicki Gunvalson. Unfortunately, many of those bright and shiny moments are clouded by a lack of direct sources and vague identifiers like “according to someone working on the show at the time,” and many of the early chapters are packed with tortured attempts to explain things without quoting anyone in a position of power at Bravo who could directly answer simple questions. It’s not until near the end that we learn the reason: “Bravo did me the favor of contacting every single real Housewife, past, present, and possibly future, and told them they were not allowed to talk to me.” That’s a gutsy reality check for a book that sets out to reveal the inner workings of reality TV. It also helps explain the numerous knocks against Bravo executive Andy Cohen. But in a meta way, it still sort of works.
Moylan gives the flawed, delightfully weird reality series the flawed, delightfully weird history it deserves.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-80760-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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