An ambitious remembrance that has much to recommend it, despite uneven execution.
Drape’s memoir in prose and poetry ponders the ideas of home, and explores weighty themes of time, loss, and mortality.
The author is a baby boomer, so the remembrance starts with idyllic childhood memories from the ’50s—in her case, during summers at her grandfather’s house on the Long Island Sound. This is followed by her time at Hunter College in New York City where she was on the staff of the student newspaper, covering turbulent times that included civil rights and Vietnam War protests, the student occupation at nearby Columbia University, and the Kent State killings in Ohio. A sense of idealism shades into a tempered disillusionment; she quotes Aristotle: “the young are full of hope, but are easily deceived.” Perhaps the most pivotal occurrence was a fire in the night that destroyed her home in 2001;she, her husband, and their three little girls managed to escape, but the event occasions reflections on luck and loss, and on what is truly important and what is not: Clearly, home was far more than a brick-and-mortar pile. The fire occurred not long after the 9/11 attacks, and she notes that “our private lives had met the zeitgeist.” It’s a theme that runs throughout the book: that one’s personal life is somehow inseparable from larger events. Good times on the water make another appearance at Lake George, one of Drape’s favorite retreats; the chapter that covers it is called “Time’s Long Game,” and its focus is geological: all the eons that it took to carve out the valley, the slow work of glaciers moving at glacial speed, and how this landscape will never stop changing for many years to come. The last chapter, oddly enough, deals with Santa Claus, and opens a discussion of myth and its importance.
Drape is a deeply earnest and experienced writer who grapples with mysteries that have bedeviled many thoughtful people in times of quiet reflection; it can be argued that such grappling never really stops. It even invades our dreams, and perhaps even fuels them. A notable aspect of this book, therefore, is its poetry; readers find reprints of such fine works as Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka” (1911) and John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” (1902), but other works by Drape are a mixed bag. Early on, especially, she tries to express solemn and heartfelt truths in rhyming couplets—a device that is most often the province of limericks and satire; as such, the sound fights the sense and the sound usually wins—there’s no challenging these old forms. Her later poems without rhymes are often charming, though, such as the haikulike “A Moment’s Peace”: “My little reed boat / Glides quietly down / the river. / There is only now.” This is a slim volume, less than 90 pages in length with a lot of white space, which fittingly gives it the feel of a chapbook. In it, Drape grapples with very familiar themes that are challenging to make new; still, she makes an admirable attempt to do so.
An ambitious remembrance that has much to recommend it, despite uneven execution.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
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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