It’s better to walk the plank than to try to get through this one.
The life of a pirate’s wife who died one of the wealthiest women in Britain’s North American Colonies.
Sarah Kidd (circa 1665-circa 1744) is no stranger to history. Neither is William Kidd, the sometime privateer, sometime pirate who roamed the seas relieving others of whatever goodies they were carrying onboard. Geanacopoulos draws on the tropes of bodice-rippers and historical fiction to get inside Sarah’s head. “As she thought back over her life, not all of her memories were fond ones, especially the time when she was a pirate’s wife,” writes the author. “But now the memory of the hardships and heartbreak had softened and Sarah wouldn’t have traded it for anything. She felt proud, very proud, to have been a pirate’s wife and she wore the title as a badge of honor.” During that time, Sarah, who finally became “a mother in her early twenties with her third husband,” watched as her husband committed various acts of mayhem. “Special and mature beyond her years,” she harbored many secrets, and the author throws red meat to buried-treasure fans by suggesting that after Kidd was executed for his crimes in 1701, Sarah took the location of the treasure to her grave. While the matter of that execution involved the complex mechanics of British politics, Geanacopoulos reduces it to yet more guesswork: Of Kidd’s being measured for chains before being strung up on the gibbet, she writes, “This experience must have been terrifying and deeply depressing for him.” Yes, so one would think, though the execution of her husband did clear the decks for Sarah to marry her fourth husband, a merchant who “quickly learned that beneath her hardened core and keen survival instincts she was lovely.” In any event, writes the author, “the idea of becoming a stepfather to the children of a famous pirate was appealing.” Unfortunately, most of the narrative is ham-fisted, and the prose is pedestrian.
It’s better to walk the plank than to try to get through this one.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-335-42984-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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