If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.
The last testament of an African American showbiz insider is here rendered as an impassioned, richly detailed, and sometimes heartbreaking evocation of Black culture in 20th century Detroit and beyond.
Joseph “Ziggy” Johnson (1913-1968) was a real-life nightclub impresario, dance studio instructor, and entertainment columnist for the Michigan Chronicle, an African American newspaper based in Detroit. As this book begins, Ziggy is near death and also near completion of what he characterizes as a “book of saints,” a collection of profiles and reminiscences of more than 50 personalities, famous, obscure, and in-between, who “whispered encouragement and clapped…forward” him and generations of those soul-nourished and otherwise entertained in the book’s legendary “Black Bottom” neighborhood during the ascendant and boom years of the city’s auto industry. At its outset, this hybrid of portrait gallery, cultural history, and dramatized biography seems to resemble a grand literary equivalent of a “Youth Colossal,” one of Ziggy’s annual Father’s Day nightclub recitals that one of his saints, the poet Robert Hayden, likens to “a W.E.B. DuBois pageant.” But as the portraits accumulate and grow in depth and breadth, they make up an absorbing and poignant account of a glittering age in the life of a once-thriving metropolis. The portraits are punctuated by celebratory “libations,” some of which have so much hard liquor and sugar cubes as to make one fear diabetic shock. Included among Ziggy’s saints: heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; funeral parlor tycoon and political leader Charles Diggs Sr.; NFL Hall of Fame defensive back Dick “Night Train” Lane, who had “come up all kinds of hard, but [whose] ambition was green and vibrant”; UAW negotiator Marc Stepp; actress Tallulah Bankhead (whom Ziggy describes as “the lady who knows no color”); theater director Lloyd George Richards; dancer Lucille Ellis; Sammy Davis Jr., who pops up throughout the narrative, characterized by Ziggy at one point as a “little genius”; Maxine Powell, who taught Motown Records’ stable of emerging stars how to comport themselves on- and offstage; and, at the tail end, Ziggy himself, whose narrative voice is seasoned with such idiosyncrasies as referring to Black folks in general as “sepians” and characterizing Black factory workers who made up his readers and audiences as “breadwinners.” This last tribute is likely the work of the unofficial collaborator whose own story and embellishments enhance this tapestry. She is referred to throughout as “Colored Girl,” but one suspects she is a surrogate for Randall, a Detroit native whose experiences writing country music likely account for the lyricism, pathos, and down-home humor in her narrative.
If Randall’s book at times gets carried away with its emotions, it also compels you to ride along with your own.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06296862-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.
A phone call from her past disrupts the tenuously reconstructed life of a concert pianist turned farmer’s wife.
We know from the beginning that Livia Cable is the battered survivor of her brother Cyrus’ death by suicide, a devastating romance, and a career-ending injury. Only 11 when Cyrus stepped in front of a train, she was already marked out as different in her rural Tennessee hometown by her extraordinary musical ability. The siblings had huddled together against their angry mother’s frequent beatings, and Livia still feels abandoned by Cyrus years later, when she picks up the phone to hear the voice of Sigurd, the fiery labor organizer she loved and lost to “the revolution” while on scholarship at the Indiana University School of Music. Now married to kind, steady childhood friend Charlie, Livia looks back on her affair with Sigurd as she struggles to deal with the recent death of her mother, a compulsive hoarder who left a house stuffed with junk to be disposed of and bitter memories that haven’t faded over time. Kingsolver skillfully juggles the two time frames to unravel Livia’s complicated feelings about the life she lost when her right hand was crushed and the life she has now as a country piano teacher. A partita, she explains to Sigurd early on, “is a composition made of a lot of parts with a lot of different moods…the artist’s work is to make them all add up to something that feels whole.” That’s precisely what Kingsolver does in this beautifully paced and judged narrative, which builds to revelations uncovered amid the piles of trash in Livia’s childhood home about the reasons for Cyrus’ suicide (clearly foreshadowed) and their mother’s rage (startling and heartbreaking). A fierce belief that great art is for everyone joins Kingsolver’s familiar preoccupations with class distinctions, social injustice, and the complex bonds of family and community in a tender denouement.
Brilliant, affecting work from one of contemporary literature’s masters.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063577541
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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