An incoherent screed.
McGuigan delivers a massive accounting of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service’s flaws.
The NHS is the subject at the heart of this oversized brick of a book; at the outset, the author proclaims, “Behold! All Recorded History within these pages is but an artefact of biological eidetic memory, a fleeting snapshot of the infinite chaos that shapes our reality.” McGuigan’s employer, Mastek (an enterprise digital and cloud transformation specialist), seems to have been contracted by the NHS until the author was fired. (“Mastek attempted to deliver the inherited TXImpact project with minimalist modifications,” he writes, adding, “Contract termination was employed to silence my vision.”) The text’s 900 pages contain a combination of embittered ex-employee kvetching (some of the book’s hundreds of short segments are addressed directly to UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer), unhinged visions, practical policy advice, and AI-generated prose and sonnets. At times, the author seems to be describing a typical bureaucracy, noting that “a never-ending statement of work is to be drip-fed to the NHS with all the difficult tasks and inherited technical debt deprioritized as Somebody Else’s Problem Tomorrow.” At other points in this endless narrative, he issues familiar-sounding complaints about the user end of the system, faulting clients who don’t know what they want. But a great deal of the book is taken up by long stretches of breathless, gonzo word salad, extensive digressions encompassing astrology, haiku, innumerable quotations from sources both real and fictional, and the struggles of an idealistic Barbie doll against the evil “Sadistic Savant.”
The overriding problem with this book is indicated by its subtitle: 99% of the text is gibberish. The author likely means to adopt an antic disposition in order to mirror the absurdities he sees in the current state of the NHS, but at every turn he repels instead of attracts open-minded readers. The book is pointlessly oversized and egregiously, insanely overwritten—it weighs 10 pounds. McGuigan has apparently written and designed it to be unreadable. He has some practical advice to offer on many aspects of NHS management, as when he touches on workforce retention: “Regularly assess internal data like employee retention rates, time to fill positions, process efficiency metrics, trends in sick days, and call-outs.” But bits and pieces like these are submerged in a sloshing sea of surreal passages like “A long and solitary vigil studying the virtual, preparing spells computer-crafted to shake stale hierarchies, coded cantrips to transform perceptions.” The author obviously has some coding knowledge, which he conveys in clear prose: “Computer programming is not simply writing trash fiction at a penny a word,” he notes; “It’s an art form requiring a high level of mental gymnastics in interaction with the computational power of a computer.” But in a book so overstuffed with bewildering nonsense, the good bits are lost. “Layers in a neural network depend on the outputs from previous layers,” McGuigan writes. “If one layer is broken, everything above it fails.” Yes, indeed.
An incoherent screed.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
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