An engaging coming-of-age account that explores manhood across cultural boundaries.
A memoir chronicles a young man’s travels in Mexico and Spain.
In this book, Stanton recounts his experiences with the Spanish language and Spanish-speaking countries. The early chapters are set in his 1950s California childhood, where he learned both idiomatic Spanish and a sense of masculinity through his interactions with undocumented Mexican immigrants. When the author reached his teen years, he ventured into the seediness of Tijuana, Mexico, visiting local sex workers and conversing with them, losing his virginity in the process. Later, he spent time living in other parts of Mexico. After college, he made his first visit to Spain, where he stayed for a while, returning in later years. The book delves into the cultural and political aspects of his travels—for instance, Stanton takes note of the repression of Franco’s government during the author’s early years in Spain and contrasts it with the socio-economic changes he found on his post-divorce visit more than a decade later. The work also examines the lessons in community and identity, particularly what it means to be a man, that Stanton absorbed through his cultural exchanges. The author is a lyrical writer (“More than immigrants they were like swallows migrating to California from their winter roost in Jalisco”), adopting a tone that suits the work’s nostalgic mood. Descriptions of his participation in iconic events, such as the running of the bulls or his first bullfight, are elegant and stand up to the inevitable comparisons to Steinbeck and Hemingway, who makes his own appearances throughout the text. Stanton employs the second person in his memoir, an unusual stylistic choice (“Your room opened onto the light-filled patio”), though there are awkward detours into other point-of-view language that can be slightly jarring (“As we watched those corridas, your friend taught you most of what you know about the bulls and the men who meet them”). The female characters, while plentiful and active in the narrative, do tend to feel secondary to the volume’s very male perspective. But as a story focused on the lives and experiences of men, the book achieves its goal and provides an enjoyable reading experience.
An engaging coming-of-age account that explores manhood across cultural boundaries.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-949003-47-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Waterside Productions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
