A heartfelt memoir of optimism in the face of abuse and neglect.
Niami describes the highs and lows of a rough childhood in this debut memoir, the first in a series.
When the author was 4 years old, about a year into her parents’ tumultuous divorce, she and her 7-year-old brother, Nile, were kidnapped by their father, Hazim, who told the siblings that they were going to Disneyland. Instead, they boarded a plane and flew to Hazim’s native city of Baghdad. Despite the strangeness of their new surroundings, the children quickly adapted to life in Iraq, enrolling in local schools and learning Arabic. After a year, the negligent and often cruel Hazim agreed to allow the children to return to their mother in America. Unfortunately, instability and negligence would continue to be themes throughout Niami’s childhood, as would abusive authority figures: Beginning at the age of 7, the author was molested by a series of men who initially appeared friendly but turned out to be monsters. As Niami recounts these traumatic experiences, she also touches on her life as a teen in Los Angeles in the 1980s as a die-hard fan of the band the Go-Go’s who experimented with drugs. The author recalls her difficult experiences with warmth and humor, even when describing the worst of times. Here she describes forcing herself to see the good in a night when, after attending an amazing concert, she was molested by her uncle: “This was the first and last time that The Bangles and the Go-Go’s ever shared the same stage exclusively…I wouldn’t have traded that for anything in the world. I wondered how my life would have been different if I hadn’t gone. Would it have really made a difference if I had had one less abuser in my life?” Like all survivor memoirs, the book often makes for a difficult read; one can almost feel Niami numbing herself just to remain a functioning human being. Her story demonstrates the ways in which certain tragedies seem to repeat themselves—and the ways people are forced to adapt in order to overcome them.
A heartfelt memoir of optimism in the face of abuse and neglect.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781647047719
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Resilientaf Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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