Light on brand-new news but a pleasure for Fab Four completists.
An overstuffed gathering of Beatlemania, an evergreen subject.
Who knew that Paul McCartney wrote “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?” after watching “a couple of monkeys copulating en plein air” in Rishikesh? Or that John Lennon hesitated to let Paul join his band since Paul could play and might jeopardize his leadership? Brown, whose last book was an award-wining biography of Princess Margaret, serves up 150 episodes, most running just a few pages, concerning the lives and work of the Beatles, with poor Ringo, as ever, mostly an afterthought. (The author quotes American writer Carolyn See to deem the drummer “patron saint of fuckups the world over.”) Brown is not an uncritical worshipper, but when he does criticize, it’s seldom fresh. He observes, as have so many, that John and Paul needed each other as creative foils and competitors and that when they separated, their solo work suffered, “with John falling back on self-pity and Paul giving in to whimsy.” Still, there are some little-known moments here, as when Kingsley Amis railed, “Oh fuck the Beatles” in a bitter letter to Philip Larkin, attaching a nasty racist epithet to Yoko Ono in passing. Another example is when Brown describes the Maharishi’s retreat in India, which, thanks to the tobacco heiress Doris Duke, was “far from spartan,” though conducive enough to feelings of spiritual exaltation that John was reduced to writing “hippy-dippy lyrics” that later resolved into such self-doubting tunes as “Jealous Guy.” Collectors of all things Beatles will relish Brown’s description of their first time getting high, courtesy of Bob Dylan, who is “an enthusiast for visiting sites associated with rock stars,” touring John’s boyhood home after the National Trust acquired it. The author sometimes second-guesses, as when he decries the cover of Abbey Road, the quartet “generally looking as if they couldn’t be arsed,” but allows that it has since become iconic and often imitated, like the Beatles themselves.
Light on brand-new news but a pleasure for Fab Four completists.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-10931-8
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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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