Deftly weaving personal and commercial history to document the rise and fall of a towering agricultural enterprise.
Uncovering devastating family secrets.
Seabrook, a New Yorker staff writer, set out to write the dramatic story of his family’s Seabrook Farms, dubbed by Life magazine as the “biggest vegetable factory on earth.” An elegant essayist and meticulous researcher, Seabrook drew on the voluminous diaries of his father, combed through decades of newspaper coverage, bank records, and litigation, and interviewed scores of former workers, business partners, and family members. He describes in intimate detail the multigenerational story of the company’s transformation from his immigrant great-grandfather’s small farm to the largest in New Jersey with 50,000 acres, growing one-third of the nation’s frozen vegetables. The author’s grandfather, C.F. Seabrook, prospered by modeling his vegetable-growing enterprise on the automobile assembly line. He hired thousands of immigrant workers from places as far-flung as Jamaica and Estonia, Black workers from the South, and 2,000 Japanese Americans from World War II incarceration camps. But all was not well within the family. Beset by alcohol-fueled misjudgments and intergenerational mistrust, the company’s meteoric rise “triggered a psychic case of the bends…not from nitrogen bubbles in the blood but from champagne bubbles at the dinner table.” With profits from frozen lima beans and spinach, the author’s father, Jack, led a glamorous lifestyle, including a romance with Eva Gabor. Seabrook grew up comfortably in this well-heeled WASP homestead, but finding a 1934 Nation article radically changed his view of the company and his family. The article documents a strike at Seabrook where workers protested wage cuts and decrepit (and segregated) housing. C.F. enlisted vigilantes, including the Ku Klux Klan, who beat the strikers with rubber hoses and axe handles. The author’s heart sank when he learned that his grandfather and beloved uncles were part of the brutal assault. Though excessive in some details, this lucidly written family history provides a unique lens through which to view changes in food production and distribution in the United States.
Deftly weaving personal and commercial history to document the rise and fall of a towering agricultural enterprise.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781324003526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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