A thoughtful collection with an urgent message.
Bearing witness to a time of crisis.
American Book Award–winner Raboteau responds to the turbulence of the past decade in 20 essays on issues that deeply affect her life: Black motherhood, racial inequality, climate change, her beloved father’s death, and the experience and effects of the global pandemic. Searching for “lessons for survival” in perilous times, she roamed New York, where she found solace in birds—some real, others depicted in murals throughout the city—that lifted her spirits “when it felt like the world was closing in.” Beset by anxiety over climate change, she traveled to Palestinian villages, where land and resources are overseen and controlled by the Israeli military; there, in the unforgiving desert, she hoped to learn how inhabitants manage their lives. In a coastal Alaskan village, she accompanied an atmospheric scientist to assess the effects of climate change in a delta basin that “is one of the fastest-warming parts of the planet.” Environmental issues are not the author’s only source of worry: Raising two boys, she is viscerally aware of racial injustice. Besides having “the talk” about how to protect themselves from the police, she needs “to prepare them for extreme heat and ungodly flooding.” Drawing similarities between climate crises that victimize people of color more severely than whites and her grandmother’s experience of fleeing the Jim Crow South, Raboteau sees her family as vulnerable to “a different hazard to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”: “the rising sea.” Her own gesture for combatting unjust policy is “to talk about it among friends and family—to make private anxieties public concerns,” as she does in these essays. “Climate grief and coronavirus grief feel strikingly parallel,” Raboteau writes. “The solutions to both problems rely on collective action and political will.” The book includes the author’s photos.
A thoughtful collection with an urgent message.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781250809766
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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