An inspiring story of personal success with valuable commentary on the quest to achieve a more just world.
In this nonfiction work, a nonprofit executive blends memoir and a vision for societal healing regarding race-related issues.
In 1963, when Tabron was 8 months old, there was a march in her hometown of Detroit, headed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He shared his vision of Black and white children “join[ing] hands as sisters and brothers,” just as he would months later, when he famously spoke at the March on Washington. Tabron reflects that the minister and activist “was talking about me.” Throughout this book, the author connects her story to important events of the 20th century. As part of the Great Migration, her parents—Herbert and Mary Louise Montgomery—fled Jim Crow Mississippi in search of better opportunities in Detroit. However, their dreams of a northern Promised Land were short lived; Tabron recalls her experiences during the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, an event fueled by decades of discrimination and police brutality. She also writes of losing some of her best friends as white families left the city. Tabron’s story also is one of personal triumph: She joined the W. K. Kellogg Foundation in 1987 and would serve in various leadership roles there before becoming its first female and first Black president and chief executive officer. In this role, she helped to launch the National Day of Racial Healing in 2017, as the foundation committed itself to continuing the King’s work of “truth-telling and solidarity building.” Tabron’s memoir offers a powerful account of success, and its social commentary challenges readers to persist in the fight for equality. Pragmatic in its approach, this useful guidebook provides practical tips on how to effect change on interpersonal and local levels in the pursuit of racial healing. It’s helpfully backed by solid research that’s cited in more than 200 endnotes, and it convincingly demonstrates what the author calls the “fallacy of ‘colorblindness.’” It also effectively argues that King’s vision will never be attained until Americans collectively confront “uncomfortable realities about our history, our society, and our own unconscious beliefs.”
An inspiring story of personal success with valuable commentary on the quest to achieve a more just world.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781633311015
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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