This is one meal you can skip.
A tale of celebrity kitchen mayhem.
Woolever came onto the high-end New York restaurant scene at 22, “the correct age to eat shit at a poverty-wage job that I hated, while living in a wet hole in the ground.” The first wet hole belonged to Mario Batali, the once-eminent empire-building chef who fell afoul of the dawning #MeToo culture with behavior that would make even the most unapologetic horndog blush: “His handsiness and constant dirty jokes and innuendo signified that it was OK, even encouraged, to squeeze and flirt with and grope each other,” Woolever recounts, and in the end, it brought him down. To her good fortune, Woolever wasn’t there for that end, having since—at Batali’s engineering—gone to work for Anthony Bourdain, the angel on Woolever’s shoulder to Batali’s devil. Much of what Woolever has to say about Bourdain is available, in one voice or another, in the oral biography Bourdain that she assembled after his death, just as much of what she has to say about restaurant work is told, and far better, in Bourdain’s own breakthrough book, Kitchen Confidential. What is not available elsewhere is an enumeration—that eventually becomes tedious and then numbing—of Woolever’s own bad behavior: pickup sex and numerous affairs while married and raising a child, abundant drugs and an endless flow of alcohol, lies and evasions and missed days of work, and all the rest. It’s noteworthy, and a detriment, that Woolever is harshly judgmental of just about everyone but herself (and, for the most part, Bourdain), cutting herself innumerable breaks for decades of infidelities and addictions until finally allowing that sobriety works better. “If Tony were still alive,” she writes, “I’d almost certainly still be working for him, maybe collaborating on a new book, instead of having written this one.” Yes, and more’s the pity.
This is one meal you can skip.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780063327603
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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