A compromised biography that still sheds light on a divisive figure.
Inside the complex world of an artist who was much more than a Beatle wife.
Veteran journalist and memoirist Sheff (Beautiful Boy, 2008) confesses early that he is friends with Yoko Ono, the performance artist, musician, and famous widow of John Lennon; he met the couple in 1980, at age 24, to conduct a wide-ranging interview for Playboy and quickly bonded with them. That doesn’t mean he eschews unpleasant elements of her history. She maintained a heroin addiction with Lennon for a time, had an expensive interest in numerologists and astrologers who chiseled her, and all but pretended that her longtime post-Lennon partner, Sam Havadtoy, didn’t exist. But the book is mainly intended as a defense of Ono: Sheff frames her as an accomplished artist well before she met Lennon at a London gallery, demolishes the false and often bigoted argument that she broke up the Beatles, and reassesses her work as a musician, which is often dismissed as shrill and tuneless. Throughout, a theme of bravery persists: She left the comfort of her well-off family in Japan and quit school to work as an independent performance artist. (Her most famous work is “Cut Piece,” in which audience members were invited to cut off pieces of her clothing as she sat still.) Moreover, she spent decades trying to locate her daughter (with her first husband), who had joined a cult and vanished. (Lennon moved with her to America in large part to make that search easier.) Much of the book’s latter sections, following Lennon’s murder in 1980, betray a friend’s effort at hagiography, praising her music and later accomplishments with little detail or context. But the best of the book reveals Ono as an emotionally sensitive and charmingly provocative artist who, in Lennon, found an ideal muse. “We saw each other’s loneliness,” she said.
A compromised biography that still sheds light on a divisive figure.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781982188245
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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