Living well is the best revenge, and the author has lived very well indeed. Highly recommended.
A memoir of a singular music mogul, his record label, and an era before rock became so corporate.
Early on, Blackwell identifies himself as “a member of the Lucky Sperm Club,” hailing from a mixed aristocratic bloodline reflective of his native Jamaica. Before music even enters the story, he recalls being punched by Errol Flynn and hanging out with Ian Fleming. Both had eyes for the author’s mother (Fleming modeled Pussy Galore on her), and both were partly responsible for popularizing the romantic notion of Jamaica as a unique tourist destination—as would Blackwell and his Island Records via their promotion of reggae music, especially Bob Marley and the Wailers. Writing with Morley, Blackwell chronicles how he straddled the cultures of London and Jamaica and how an indifferent student with few career prospects learned the music business from the ground up—stocking jukeboxes, paying close attention to what was drawing the crowds on Jamaican sound systems, and then delving into the process of recording, producing, and releasing music on his own label. He took his passion for Jamaican music back to England, where the breakthrough R&B/ska hit by teenager Millie Small, “My Boy Lollipop,” helped establish Blackwell as someone who could help emerging talent. The author went on to champion a young Steve Winwood and, later, U2. Though not a musician or studio technician, Blackwell showed a knack for putting people together in settings where magic might happen—and then recognizing it when it did. A wide variety of artists flourished at Island—from Tom Waits to Marianne Faithfull, Robert Palmer to Grace Jones—and Blackwell continued to demonstrate his originality in an increasingly stale industry. Yet Island was caught in the middle—too big to be a true indie, not big enough to compete with the majors—and Blackwell became a casualty of corporate consolidation.
Living well is the best revenge, and the author has lived very well indeed. Highly recommended.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-69-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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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