An educator’s professional and personal lives together make for an engaging, richly detailed true story.
Reno’s memoir spotlights a man who has gladly devoted 40 years of his life to teaching.
The author’s path to becoming a community college English professor wasn’t one he ever would have predicted. The second of five children, Reno was still young when his family moved from Kansas to Florida for his father’s new job opportunity. He craved adventure after his high school graduation and eventually became an intelligence analyst in the Air Force, which stationed him in England. After four years of military service, he found his options were limited—corporate life didn’t suit him, so the author applied his degree in English to educating youth, launching his “full-time professional career” at a Florida community college in 1974, when he was in his 30s. It was unquestionably a challenge, as he had no prior experience, and his wife, Pat, was pregnant with their first child. Reno stayed at the college for many years, only moving on for new positions in the same field, including a stint as the CEO of a community college in Colorado and a job as “Founding President” at a Texas community college that hadn’t yet been built. The author had a passion for giving students “every opportunity for personal, social, and academic success” through means that often went beyond teaching—he excelled at fundraising and helped to develop a brand-new college’s architectural features to maintain a clean campus and student satisfaction. By the time he retired, in 2014, he had learned many valuable lessons that he could pass on to youngsters.
Reno’s book deftly fuses his educational career with his personal life. He describes a childhood that certainly wasn’t free of troubles: His father’s drinking, following a seizure, resulted in unusually erratic behavior, and the family suffered a financial blow with a failed movie theater investment, just as televisions were popping up in more and more homes. Despite the author intermittently highlighting such details as places he’s lived and his mentors and influences, this memoir is primarily chronological and easy to follow. Reno occasional includes essays or letters that, though written at different points in his life, connect to whatever topic a particular chapter focuses on. The narrative contains a wealth of historical details—Reno, who’s a white male, first entered a segregated school at age 12 (in 1954) and witnessed much racial and sexual discrimination both in and outside the workforce. It’s hardly surprising that this retired English professor’s prose is lucid and refreshingly polished. The undeniable affection for the work he’s done comes through as well, and he’s not above a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, as when he arms students with literature terminology in case they’re “kidnapped by a rogue book club.”
An educator’s professional and personal lives together make for an engaging, richly detailed true story.Pub Date: April 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781662932236
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
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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