A bleak but often engrossing real-life story of an eventful and sometimes-dangerous life.
In this debut memoir, a young man explores his sexuality and spirals into illicit drug use.
Hubert was born in 1982, and his early life in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was a continuous struggle with poverty. Still, he was mostly happy, as he grew up with a loving mother and a doting grandmother. In 2000, when he was 17, he joined the U.S. Air Force and underwent basic training in San Antonio. Hubert, though sexually inexperienced, already knew he was gay, and so did a surprising number of his fellow recruits; the experience, he says, initially seemed like a "gay paradise." The internet afforded him the chance to have casual sex with other men, and he did so with reckless abandon. This led to his first experience with a sexually transmitted disease, which the author graphically describes in perhaps the book’s most difficult scene to read. After he left the military, Hubert later found solace in volunteer work for a Christian church. He also loved partying and wearing extravagant attire, and although he’d steered clear of drugs while in the Air Force, he soon dabbled in cocaine and methamphetamines and racked up dangerous debts. Bill collectors were trying to track him down, and a terrifying drug dealer threatened him with violence. Hubert eventually lost hope when he learned that he was HIV positive, as he considered the diagnosis a “death sentence.” He knew that he wanted to realize his dream of running his own business. But before that, he’d have to fight to stay alive, and that meant getting himself far away from drugs—both as an abuser and as a dealer.
Given the subject matter, readers will likely anticipate a somber autobiography in these pages, and indeed, it frequently is. However, the author’s consistent optimism helps to alleviate the moments of grimness. He recounts numerous explicit sexual encounters shared between willing participants who enjoyed one another. Hubert also tells of how his connection to spirituality—specifically, to God and Jesus—though often tested, served him well in his life. Over the course of this book, Hubert’s straightforward prose is occasionally sparse in style, with only nominal details about his surroundings. Still, he clearly and memorably portrays the events of his life throughout. A gig at a call center during his time in Houston, for example, took place in a rowdy “maze of cubicles,” with a stunning view of the city spoiled by the loathsome manager yelling “Get to work!” His descent into cocaine and meth abuse is suitably unnerving; he had tense encounters with cops and often seemed alarmingly oblivious to the perpetual danger surrounding him—even when one person was intent on killing him. Hubert wraps up his life story in the present day, about a decade after the bulk of the events herein. Rather oddly, though, he ends the memoir with a post-epilogue in which he tells of an apparent encounter with witchcraft as a teenager.
A bleak but often engrossing real-life story of an eventful and sometimes-dangerous life.Pub Date: March 16, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985896329
Page Count: 365
Publisher: DownUnder Media LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2022
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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