An engaging account about the way unhealthy entanglements can affect an actor’s life.
A debut memoir recounts a tumultuous rise from troubled child to working actor.
It’s bad enough to find out your wife is cheating on you with your best friend on the set of the television show where you work. It’s even worse when your boss, Shonda Rhimes, has to spell it out for you. That’s exactly what happened to Short on the set of the hit show Scandal, where he was a series regular. He was so devastated by the reveal that he tried to walk into traffic; it was only through the intervention of his co-stars that he was prevented from doing so. The event was the climax of a series of ups and downs that had plagued the author throughout his life. He was born while his mother was awaiting trial for shooting and killing his father, a Kansas City police officer. “That might sound wild,” Short explains, “but you’d also have to know that my father was an extremely crooked cop. He ran in the streets, he had a drug ring, a prostitution ring….My mother was the good girl dating the bad guy, and eventually it caught up to her.” From his mother’s serial relationships to his own fraught romantic entanglements—exacerbated by substance abuse—the author’s troubled life didn’t keep him from achieving success. But it did threaten to destroy that success once he found it. Short’s prose is conversational and fluid, and he employs it in spinning just the sort of celebrity stories that readers expect. Here, he describes his advisory role in the career of Britney Spears: “ ‘Larry, hear me out,’ I told him. ‘Didn’t Britney just kiss Madonna at the MTV Awards?’ Obviously, the answer was yes. ‘Put Madonna on the record, and it’s gone. It’s out of here!’ ” The book moves quickly and demands little of readers. While hardly a life-altering read, Short’s work—written with Mendez—offers a good mix of show-business memoir, recovery narrative, and barroom-style yarns. By the end of it, it’s clear that he is grateful for the lessons learned, and readers will have at the very least been entertained.
An engaging account about the way unhealthy entanglements can affect an actor’s life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73330-410-8
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Kingston Imperial
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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