Even teetotalers will relish the insights into this arcane world.
The life of high-end bartending gets a thorough examination in this vivid memoir of setting up and running a Los Angeles establishment.
Like many graduates of performing arts schools, Alperin had to get side jobs in New York to support his dream of becoming an actor. The more he worked, the more he realized that bartending, which has its own dramatic side, was his true calling. In this brash and insightful book co-written with screenwriter and journalist Stoll, Alperin traces his move to LA, where, with “barfly entrepreneur” Cedd Moses and the colorful “microdoser” Sasha Petraske (“central casting's wet dream of the nutty professor”), he opened The Varnish, a small bar dedicated to precise renderings of classic cocktails, the “kind of place someone would want to tell their friends about but also keep to themselves.” This isn't the usual breezy or dutiful as-told-to memoir but rather a deep and meticulous dive into Alperin's personality and experiences. Consequently, sometimes the narrative is spectacularly and absorbingly dorky: If you haven't thought about the process of making ice or about those cubes or chunks we unthinkingly drop into our glasses, you will now. Just as often, the text zooms in on the minutiae of a night in the life of the bartender: “Bostick dry-shakes a Ramos gin fizz with short, hard strokes while I stir up a manhattan in a mixing glass, like spinning a spool of liquid silk, the rye’s dark legs spiraling down the glass, lightening in color as it dilutes.” Alperin doesn't hold back on the details of his personal life, revealing plenty about drugs and anonymous sex. The book also includes a substantial midsection with instructions on how to make enough familiar and exotic drinks to keep the home drinker occupied for a lifetime.
Even teetotalers will relish the insights into this arcane world.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289928-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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 substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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