A pleasurable remembrance that revels in the author’s complex wonder at the world.
Empowerment Institute co-founder Straub offers a memoir of her journey to discover and refine her empowerment pedagogy via world travel and cultural study.
Straub’s story begins with her high school trip to Paraguay in the mid-1960s and ends in Morocco in 2018, moving chronologically, with each chapter devoted to a different region where the author spent time. Straub takes the reader with her as she visits the Sahara, on her walking pilgrimage in southern Ireland, to Burkina Faso and the Annapurna Circuit in the Himalayas in Nepal, and to Russia during the late 1980s and early ’90s. She writes in an immediate present tense, so readers exist beside her at every step; however, she sometimes breaks the illusion with the benefit of hindsight and acknowledgement of regrets and missteps from the perspective of an older self. Straub’s voice offers a rare balance of humility and self-assertion. In each chapter, she tells the reader about her teacher or teachers in that section’s geographical focus—whether they are an interpreter, a sherpa, or other guide—and she thinks back to past instructors as the book proceeds. In effect, the work is a lengthy origin story of her own teachings on empowerment and her role as executive director at the Empowerment Institute, which she founded with her husband, David Gershon, and it feels in accordance with these same principles, which celebrate connection and collaboration. In a chapter set in Jordan, for instance, she learns something about hospitality that feeds her teachings; in another, set in China, she reminds herself that the “best way to truly understand what’s going on in another culture is to travel to that country and listen as the people speak directly for themselves.” A great deal of travel writing tends to fetishize cultures, but Straub takes a balanced and nuanced approach with keen awareness of colonialism and other global issues. Lytle’s occasional grayscale drawings include simplified maps and cultural touchstones.
A pleasurable remembrance that revels in the author’s complex wonder at the world.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781963827194
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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