A powerful account of addiction and incarceration in 21st-century America.
Drasen recalls his experiences with addiction, incarceration, and healing in this memoir.
The author opens with a vignette from a day in Feb. 2019, which he planned to spend with family celebrating his mother’s 61st birthday. What began as a pit-stop to pick up a free heroin sample from his dealer, T-Bone, ended with him passing out in his car before being awoken by an emergency medical technician and the police. Given that he was already on probation—with a rap sheet that included seven felonies and two prison sentences—Drasen knew that he would be arrested. The rest of the work blends anecdotes ranging from his childhood to his young adult years and his imprisonment in 2019. The book’s nearly 90 sections alternate between journal entries from his time in the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility and chapters offering autobiographical sketches of his upbringing in a loving home, fond memories of his grandparents, his initial addiction to OxyContin as a 15-year-old, and his lifelong mental health battle with Seasonal Affective Disorder (a condition exacerbated by the winter climate of his home state of Wisconsin). The journal entries, which span from February through July of 2019, reflect on his desire for recovery and provide an insider’s look at the American prison system. A medium-security facility, MSDF had better food and more professional guards than the county prisons the author had prior experience with, but it was overcrowded and offered limited opportunities for improvement (the author spent 20 hours a day in his cell). Other topics addressed in the journal entries include racial dynamics and the prison system’s “extremely lackluster” recovery programs that “recycle the same information and follow the same curriculum,” which Drasen describes as “a waste of time.”
Central to the narrative is the importance of faith and hope in the author’s eventually recovery. While he occasionally cites Bible verses, Drasen approaches faith with broad strokes; he often refers to God as “my Higher Power” and posits that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and those from other faith traditions “are all united under God.” This theologically vague but inclusive conception of faith also applies to the memoir’s titular emphasis on hope. (“So long as there’s air in your lungs,” the author reassures his readers, “there is still hope.”) While much of this work is devoted to the gritty, often poignant chronicle of Drasen’s personal story (rife with expletive-laden stories of sex, drug addiction, and prison life), it doubles as a self-help guidebook speaking directly to “anyone who has ever felt broken, stuck, addicted…or out of chances.” The text is full of inspirational quotations and prayers and includes a companion workbook and other ancillary materials for readers seeking personal growth and healing. It also provides a powerful social commentary on the failures of mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, cash bail, and punitive approaches to addiction as told by someone who experienced them firsthand. While Drasen has accomplished much since his release from MSDF in terms of personal recovery and entrepreneurial success, that story is unfortunately absent from this volume’s narrative.
A powerful account of addiction and incarceration in 21st-century America.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798999641502
Page Count: 418
Publisher: Vision of Hope Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2025
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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