A persuasive case for education reform based on data and classroom experience.
In this memoir, Harris recounts her days as a substitute teacher in Philadelphia’s public schools.
The book’s first section gives a detailed day-by-day account of Harris’ first months of teaching in 2001 and 2002, moving from one school to another frequently and rarely spending more than a day with the same students. By the end of the school year, Harris, who had previously worked as a screenwriter, decided that teaching was not the career for her. The book’s second section analyzes the problems facing urban public schools and the teachers who work in them and is followed by an assessment of how individual schools have changed in the past two decades. In the third section, Harris returns to the classroom in 2017 for an insider’s view of how substitute teaching has changed since her previous stint. She ended up spending most of the year with a challenging group of students who responded to her teaching but were poorly served by the system as a whole. She concludes by assessing the structural problems of the education system, focusing on the push to include children with behavioral problems in mainstream classrooms without enough supervision or support to allow all students the opportunity to learn. Harris is a strong storyteller, and although the amount of detail included in the book’s first section makes the text overlong, it also paints a lively, intimate picture of the challenges faced by well-intentioned but naïve educators. The author addresses the racial and socio-economic aspects of school problems from a unique perspective: Harris, a Black Philadelphia native who attended parochial schools, was both familiar with the lives of the students she met and also shocked by the difference between her school experience and theirs. Harris’ thoughtful and impassioned exploration of what makes a classroom work offers parents, educators, and policymakers solid suggestions for improving the school environment.
A persuasive case for education reform based on data and classroom experience.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9881797-3-8
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Angelwalk LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
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