A fulsome portrait of a quixotic, disruptive, talented woman.
The turbulent and complicated romantic life of legendary flapper Nancy Cunard (1896-1965).
In her latest, de Courcy, a prolific social historian and author of Chanel’s Riviera and The Husband Hunters, among other books, focuses on bewitching shipping heiress Cunard’s famous lovers and a key, long-lasting friendship with her mother’s lover, the Irish writer George Moore. The author also provides incisive profiles of her lovers. Drawing on Cunard’s revealing diaries, de Courcy zeros in on her 14 years living in the exciting milieu of Jazz Age Paris. The brilliant, independence-seeking Cunard lived an unconventional, remarkable life. She hastily married in 1916, but the relationship lasted less than two years, and her life became a promiscuous, boozy adventure tempered with writing poetry and lamenting the early death of a lover. In 1920, she escaped to Paris. “It was not long,” writes the author, “before Nancy, rich, gorgeous-looking and stylish…became one of the icons” of the Roaring ’20s and a muse to Michael Arlen, author of the popular The Green Hat, whose heroine was modeled on Nancy. Early on, Cunard met the flamboyant, married Ezra Pound, who had his own affairs. Unlike Arlen, de Courcy notes, she deeply loved him for five or six years. It wasn’t reciprocated, but they remained friends. She moved on to numerous cities and the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis, and then to Robert McAlmon, the American writer and influential publisher. Unlike Pound, Aldous Huxley fell “desperately and obsessively” in love with Cunard, but his wife put a firm end to it. Her next lover was Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and they shared a “light-hearted and fun” affair. After Tzara, Cunard experienced an “intense” and doomed “passionate” relationship with poet Louis Aragon. In 1928, Cunard founded the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett’s first poem, “Whoroscope,” and had the “most important love affair” of her life, with Henry Crowder, a married Black jazz pianist. Under his influence, she would later publish Negro, her own groundbreaking anthology about African American history, art, and politics.
A fulsome portrait of a quixotic, disruptive, talented woman.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781250272560
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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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