An urgent, astute synthesis of many hard truths about racial backlash.
An impassioned account of how Black Americans’ civil rights gains continue to unravel.
Sellers, author of My Vanishing Country, fuses memoir with a cogent discussion of “whitelash” since the 1960s, but especially since the Trump presidency. A CNN commentator whose emotional response to the murder of George Floyd went viral when he exclaimed, “It’s hard being Black in this country when your life is not valued,” the author notes, “I struggle, like most mothers and fathers of Black children, particularly Black boys, to explain the world that they’re walking into.” Sellers grew up in rural South Carolina, listening to his father, a civil rights activist, “discuss all the deaths he’d seen in the 1960s and the day he was shot during the Orangeburg massacre.” The author links this chilling depiction of “white terrorism in the hot Delta summer” to a resurgence of right-wing violence, as well as patterns of police brutality. Sellers moves easily among his family history and subtopics including the resilience of the Black church, the disproportionate toll of Covid-19 on Black communities, and the persistence of institutional racism alongside the pernicious role of “racial capitalist[s]” like Tucker Carlson, whose rhetoric directly influenced the race-motivated mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, in 2022. “Spanning the Civil War and the civil rights eras,” writes Sellers, “this country has experienced two reconstructions followed by a white supremacist pushback against each,” and the author links this to post-Obama voter suppression. “The supporters of white supremacist philosophy—whether they be Donald Trump, Jesse Watters, Megyn Kelly, Mitch McConnell, or others—want to maintain all the power,” he writes. In impressively concise fashion, Sellers makes a host of pertinent arguments crisply and effectively, disturbingly documenting the overtness of efforts to maintain structural racism across the country.
An urgent, astute synthesis of many hard truths about racial backlash.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780063085022
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
