An engaging, if slightly uneven, doctor’s memoir.
A retired eye surgeon looks back on her remarkable life and career.
MacKay, who was born in 1942, begins her autobiography with an extensive overview of her girlhood and young adulthood in the ’40s and early ’50s, when there were scarcely any examples of people living the life she’d go on to lead: “The only female doctor I knew was my aunt, who had a part-time psychiatry practice.” She graduated from Harvard University in 1964, married her attorney husband Malcolm, had two children, and eventually entered medical school in 1973. She went on to become resident and to specialize in eye care—specifically, retinal surgery—and she includes plenty of reflections on the profession: “Good surgeons never rush. They have no sense of urgency,” she notes. “They keep up a steady, leisurely pace. They appear to be doing very little.” This part of her recollection also features accounts of frequent clashes with the institutional sexism of the medical world; in one such incident, an anesthesiologist loudly and condescendingly asked her, “How soon are you going to be finished?”—a question, she rightly notes, that would never have been asked of a male surgeon. The strongest element in her book’s final section is her account of her 30-year fight against the popular laser-assisted eye surgery called LASIK, which makes for the most passionate reading in an otherwise genial book. She writes that complications resulting from this type of surgery are “multiple, disastrous, untreatable, and permanent,” including lifelong pain, disability, and even blindness. The main weakness of the book, though, is the lack of balance between the personal and professional. She writes energetically and engagingly about both parts of her life, but the minute details of the author’s childhood (such as the fact that her grandmother served stewed prunes) are nowhere near as interesting as her experiences as a woman forging a career in a male-dominated profession or her critiques of the most popular form of eye surgery. Whether she’s discussing her time as a medical resident, as a surgeon, or as a professor at Columbia University, her working life is unfailingly compelling.
An engaging, if slightly uneven, doctor’s memoir.Pub Date: July 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798332863844
Page Count: 332
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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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