A remembrance that provides a sharp, detailed image of a tumultuous life.
A memoir of growing up in a military household in the 1950s and ’60s.
Brown, the author of the novel Tell You All (2000), was born in 1951 at Fort Benning in Georgia, and he describes his father as a domineering and violent presence in his life. His dad was a career U.S. Air Force officer who, according to the author, could fly into an abusive rage at the slightest provocation. The family moved frequently, from Michigan to Nebraska to Germany and elsewhere as the author’s father received new postings. Much of the book takes place in Texas, where they lived outside of Dallas during turbulent times as the Vietnam War raged; views that were outside the status quo could land one in trouble. As the author’s brother pointed out, “Anybody can be a hippie love freak in California. But hell, you gotta be tough, know how to fight to be a pacifist in Texas.” The author rebelled against educators that legally doled out corporal punishment; he also regularly endured his father’s wrath, he says. He fell in with a leftist group called the Revolutionary Youth Movement, which was affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, and met people who experimented with drugs. He eventually got a GED diploma rather than continue in his hostile high school environment. Later, however, he joined the U.S. Navy, although he had a rough go of it, ultimately obtaining a general under honorable discharge before completing basic training.
Although the author notes that he eventually found stable ground, his story is one of frequent disappointments and countless physical confrontations. The prose style is sparse but telling; for example, here the author describes the Texas town in which his family lived: “Bereft of visual stimuli, the most outstanding features of this Dallas suburb were the Cowboy Stadium and a multi-lane interstate slab of concrete.” Along the way, Brown presents stories of threats and beatings and even tells of visits from the FBI, who looked into his RYM activities; as the author paints a picture of the time, it seems amazing that anyone not toeing the line could come out alive. Readers also get a thorough experience of the author’s time in the Navy, from the bus ride to the Nimitz Naval Training Center to the consequences he faced for being a cutup. Even the author’s exit from the armed forces was no simple feat, Brown explains; those who received the type of discharge he did were treated as “neither fish nor fowl; neither bad nor tough enough to do time, nor strong enough morally, physically, and intellectually to stick it out.” By contrast, a later portion on a trip to Europe provides little of interest; the author returned to where he once lived in Germany, but he does not discover all that much about himself in the process. Still, by that point, readers will be willing to follow the author for every step of his turbulent journey.
A remembrance that provides a sharp, detailed image of a tumultuous life.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-79804-611-9
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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