A searing portrait of the blight of systemic bias and disadvantage in Black people’s lives.
A Black woman gets trampled by Oklahoma’s criminal justice system in this exposé.
Journalist Mersch tells the story of Miashah Moses, a 23-year-old African American woman in Tulsa. In 2013, Moses left her two nieces, 4-year-old Noni and 18-month-old Nylah, alone in their apartment for about eight minutes while she took out the garbage. During that time, a fire broke out and killed the girls. The tragedy sparked a Kafkaesque criminal case against the distraught Moses. Held in jail for years on an unpayable $500,000 bond, she was charged at one point with second-degree murder by prosecutors who argued that she willfully neglected the girls by fleeing the apartment to buy drugs and started the fire by leaving a pan of grease heating on the stove. The case was weak: The supposed drug dealer testified that Moses was not the woman he met that day, and copious evidence surfaced that the building’s faulty wiring had caused similar fires. But Moses’ pro bono attorney never told her about the defective wiring and instead pressured her into a plea bargain and a 15-year sentence in Mabel Bassett Correctional Center, a squalid place. Mersch braids into the woman’s travails the experiences of other female inmates and of Moses’ extended family, including a mentally disturbed cousin who was murdered in prison after killing his father and an uncle found drowned under suspicious circumstances that the police never investigated. The author sets these misfortunes against a history of racial injustice in Tulsa dating back to the 1921 pogrom in which White mobs killed hundreds of Black residents and including a recent scandal in which the city’s police fabricated evidence against dozens of defendants.
Mersch makes Moses’ saga into a crackerjack legal narrative that has courtroom drama and intricate but lucid forensic analysis. There are sharply observed characters, including Moses’ fiercely protective mother, Chrisandria; the vindictive district attorney who viewed the defendant as a symbol of moral degeneracy; and the bullying, narcissistic judge who told Moses she had a 10-day window to retract her guilty plea but then denied her withdrawal petition. There’s considerable mayhem in the book (“She watched horrified as he fell, twisting and turning in the air, screaming as he descended, his arms flailing as he hurtled in a free fall onto the roof of the eight-story parking garage 17 stories below,” the author writes of a woman who denied pushing her husband to his death but wound up in Mabel Bassett anyway). The violence and plenty of punchy, if sometimes purplish, prose—“If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sticky fingers of the law will suck you in like a Venus fly trap”—capture the ruinous twists of fate that bedevil the author’s subjects. Through Moses and her family, Mersch maps society’s very uneven playing field: the benefit of the doubt and lenient sentencing that White defendants receive for actions similar to Moses’; the poverty that puts Black people more often in harm’s way; the fines, fees, and court costs that saddle them with crippling debts for even trivial misdemeanors; the permanent stain a criminal record puts on a resume. The result is a troubling look at justice that is anything but colorblind.
A searing portrait of the blight of systemic bias and disadvantage in Black people’s lives.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-952320-58-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Yorkshire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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
© 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.
