The vicarious experience of wealth, glamour, and romance is rarely this much fun. A truly great celebrity memoir.
The diva recounts the action-packed first half of her life story, an all-American rags-to-riches dream.
Like Barbra Streisand, this iconic woman, born in 1946, is going to need about a thousand pages to tell the story of her amazing life and career—but she has chosen to do it in two volumes. This one ends about eight years before she won her Oscar for Moonstruck in 1988, but having started her partnership with Sonny Bono at the age of 16, there is plenty to cover. She begins at the beginning: “I mean, jeez. My family. You couldn’t make it up.” Though Cher grew up with sour milk, ants in the Rice Krispies, and saddle shoes held together with rubber bands, her mother always won the “misery Olympics” with stories of her own past: “Did your dad ever try to gas you in your sleep?” Georgia Holt, this beautiful man-eater actress mom, was married six times (twice to Cher’s “smooth-talking Armenian father,” Johnnie Sarkisian), and Cher’s relationship with her, which included quite a bit of difficulty over the years but always landed on love, seems to presage her history with Bono. He died in 1998, creating an opportunity for affecting candor and self-reflection about their trajectory, which included a divorce on the basis that “Sonny had held me in ‘involuntary servitude,’ in direct violation of the US Constitution’s Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery.” Their comedy act continued to thrive after their split: She loved this man, and always will. The story of Sonny & Cher is a story of the ’60s and ’70s, of the growth of the music and television industries, of fashion and celebrity culture, of the evolving role of women in the 20th century. And the skinny on her relationships with music mogul David Geffen, second husband Gregg Allman, and Kiss frontman Gene Simmons is just as riveting. “We talked so long on the phone he ended up with a $2,800 phone bill,” she writes of Simmons. “That’s when he blurted out that he loved me….What is it with these men?”
The vicarious experience of wealth, glamour, and romance is rarely this much fun. A truly great celebrity memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780062863102
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
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