A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.
A memoir of incarceration, literature, and redemption.
For one week in August 2003, 25-year-old Genis robbed people at knifepoint to support his $100-per-day heroin habit. Although he immediately told his victims he was sorry, the “Apologetic Bandit” was given a 12-year sentence—10 with good behavior— by a judge who thought the White, middle-class NYU graduate “should have known better.” In a sharp, wry memoir, the author, a journalist and translator, chronicles his life in a dozen compounds in upstate New York, including four maximum security prisons, a world “utterly unknown” to those outside prison walls. He reflects on some of the 1,046 books—by Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, Proust, among many others—that he read while an inmate. “Reading’s evolution into writing,” he found, “made the difference between merely surviving ten years of incarceration and finding meaning in it.” Each chapter focuses on “a specific demographic slice of the incarcerated population”—Blacks, Latinos, gang members, and the mentally ill, for example—or a facet of prison life, such as food, solitary confinement, methods of smuggling in drugs and weapons, rare conjugal visits, and the particular cruelties of being transported on prison buses. Like an anthropologist, Genis sees prison “as a laboratory to study how men self-organize into societies, and watching that development is effectively a look into our Stone Age past.” He notes the codes, behaviors, assumptions, and prejudices that factored into group affiliation. “Race,” he writes, “mattered to an extent I had never witnessed previously. It was both a reason to oppress and to redress perceived wrongs.” As a White man, he found it impossible to “not have some relationship with the concept of white power. One cannot be neutral on the subject; the other prisoners do not allow it. Being white means being a minority, and a hated one at that.” The author’s voice is insightful, candid, and sometimes darkly humorous.
A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-42955-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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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