Despite an abundance of eye-glazing minutiae, a revealing epistolary portrait emerges of life on the battlefield and at home.
A couple separated by war vents fears, frustrations and intense longing in this sometimes banal, sometimes passionate correspondence.
Bill Clark, then a captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces, went off to Vietnam in 1970, leaving his four months-pregnant wife, Donna, behind in Florida. His letters home from his posting as an adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion are full of homesickness, sweltering discomfort and endless boredom punctuated by moments of trauma. (“Oh, well, at least it killed some time,” he remarks after American planes mistakenly bomb his unit.) Donna usually replies with meandering details of her daily life—“I stayed home and washed and set my hair, then went to Burdine’s with Mom to buy Debbie and Steve their birthday gifts and got them another bath towel set apiece!” —but reveals her own keen anxieties over Bill’s safety and her worsening finances as her allotment checks from his Army pay go undelivered. (Their frantic, confused messages about money—necessarily conveyed via erratic, weeks-delayed postal deliveries—make for an inarguable case for the benefits of instant email and satellite communication.) The tension that separation imposes on the newlyweds runs through their exchanges: Bill chides Donna for staying out until four in the morning and mentions a comrade who is divorcing an untrustworthy wife; Donna pointedly passes along warnings about venereal disease among Vietnamese prostitutes. Although the letters focus on personal life, Vietnam-era social turmoil—drug use in the military, race riots, reports of hippies stoning President Nixon—seeps in around the edges. The selection could have profited from editing and, for this chapter that covers the first five months of Bill’s tour, the excision of less urgent missives (“Well, Honey, another dull day”). Still the Clarks’ personalities, typical of the continuing concerns faced by military families, come through vividly. The couple’s strong love and commitment are expressed in lavish pet names (“Dear Dunky Doo-Doo”), in Donna’s frank declarations of desire and in Bill’s constant romantic protestations: “This letter is to inform you that your husband is very much in love with you.”
Despite an abundance of eye-glazing minutiae, a revealing epistolary portrait emerges of life on the battlefield and at home.Pub Date: April 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468020885
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
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
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