A searing story about the moral costs of war and the healing power of remembrance.
A man grapples with his father’s dementia, a crumbling marriage, and the psychic fallout of the war in Afghanistan in Liddick’s memoir.
The author, a lawyer in the United States Army, revisits a period of several years beset by personal and family traumas. The most dramatic was his 2018 deployment to Afghanistan, where he was tasked with vetting the legality of drone strikes on suspected terrorists who were dispersed among the civilian population. The assignment was a pressure cooker in which he watched real-time aerial surveillance video of suspects loitering in villages and tried to decipher ambiguous situations with life-and-death consequences: A missile strike that he approved might eliminate enemy fighters who endangered American soldiers—or kill innocent civilians. When a commander ordered reckless strikes that killed children, Liddick felt torn between his duty to speak out and pressures to stay silent. He came home with intractable PTSD, complete with nightmares, panic attacks, and migraines, which frayed his marriage while he coped with his father Ray’s 13-year struggle with Alzheimer’s. These events frame a meditation on Liddick’s complex relationship with his father, illustrated by the plainspoken letters Ray sent to the author in Marine Corps boot camp (“Get used to dealing with morons! You will have them throughout your life”). Through a succession of homely reminiscences of Ray—building a pond, rescuing Liddick from a swarm of yellow jackets, expressing his embarrassment when Liddick over-emotes in the end zone after a touchdown in a juvenile football game—the author’s father emerges as a sympathetic, ebullient figure who was also possessed of a volatile temper and a tendency to “go along to get along” that his son sees in himself. As Liddick fights to regain his mental balance, memories of his dad provide a connection that steadies him.
Liddick’s narrative combines a loving but fraught father-son portrait with a suspenseful and evocative depiction of drone combat in Afghanistan (“I can see the point of impact,” he writes of a strike gone wrong, “but where I expect to see one body, there lay two, their dark clothes in stark relief against the settling sienna dust”) that left him lacerating himself over his participation (“all of it derived, in an unbroken chain of events, from my need…to be the person others wanted me to be: a lawyer who said yes, who never strayed from his lane, who allowed them—us—to kill”). He conveys all of this in prose that is psychologically penetrating and steeped in vivid, novelistic detail; recalling a nursing home visit, he writes, “I find Dad at the far end of an interminable hallway. He stands at the opposite window, gazing out at something, at nothing. I stare down the tunnel, my vision blurred at the edges, as the refracted light bathes his sagging body….Melancholy overtakes me as I begin walking the long, sad fluorescent tunnel, destined to meet him, where, I don’t know.” The result is an intense exploration of guilt, with familial bonds of love providing a wandering but indispensable pathway to redemption.
A searing story about the moral costs of war and the healing power of remembrance.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781960146106
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Warren Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 24, 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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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