A fascinating resurrection from the dark side of the 1960s and ’70s.
A cautionary tale from the countercultural past, full of revolutionary glory and ugly criminality.
In 1963, Gary Goodson (1945-1978) left his home in Phoenix, Arizona, to study business at the University of Utah. Discharged from the Air Force for perceived psychological problems, Goodson transformed himself into Thomas King Forçade—the latter tellingly pronounced to rhyme with facade—and found his fortune in two parallel careers. The first, writes former Entertainment Weekly editor Howe, was taking over the operations of a faltering alternative-press venture called the Underground Press Syndicate, whose purpose was “to pool the resources of dozens of budget-crunched publications, to share the content and revenue from national advertising deals.” Forçade’s new career soon drew the attention of the Phoenix police and their own underground, a network of outwardly groovy informants, and then, in time, the Secret Service and the FBI. One of Forçade’s most glorious moments as a muckraking journalist was demanding White House and other governmental access for underground newspapers, prevailing in a court case that, Howe notes, was cited as precedent when the Trump White House tried to expel journalist Jim Acosta nearly half a century later. A revolutionary rabble-rouser with ties to the Yippie offshoot called the Zippies, and on the enemy’s list of older activists such as Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg, Forçade proved a brilliant firebrand. He was also a good capitalist, playing both sides of the legal fence. He smuggled and sold drugs of all kinds and, in 1974, launched the magazine High Times, born, according to one account, when “we were sitting around getting stoned on nitrous oxide and laughing gas one day when someone said ‘Hey, why not write about getting high?’ ” The magazine was instantly successful, which oddly seemed to accelerate Forçade’s downward psychological spiral and its tragic conclusion. It adds up to an impossibly tangled drama, but Howe chronicles it expertly.
A fascinating resurrection from the dark side of the 1960s and ’70s.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780306923913
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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