An engaging corporate memoir and love letter to the television industry.
Jankowski, the former president and chairman of the CBS Broadcast Group, recalls his life in the television industry in this memoir.
Born in 1934 during the Great Depression, the author remembers the first time he saw a television set. The thrill he had always enjoyed in movie theaters “was now available in people’s living rooms.” From that moment in the 1940s onward, Jankowski was hooked on TV. After graduating from Canisius College as an English major and serving a stint in the Navy, the author took a job with CBS Radio in New York City, where he moved up the corporate ranks until he was named president and chairman of the CBS Broadcast Group in 1977. Pulling back the curtain on his corporate experience, the author delves into the “glamor and glitz” of the television industry and his dealings with a myriad of special interest groups that ranged from advertising agencies on Madison Avenue to politicians in Washington, D.C. During his 12 years as CEO, he remained dedicated to protecting the “image and the quality” of CBS News, which included such bedrocks of American television journalism as CBS Sunday Morning and 48 Hours, while he renegotiated contracts with the National Football League and turned down a real estate proposal from Donald Trump to relocate their broadcast center. Readers are given an insider’s account that includes anecdotes of Jankowski’s interactions with CBS’s biggest stars, from Diane Sawyer, Martha Stewart, and Angela Lansbury to CJ the orangutan, a “surprise TV star” of the 1980s who made appearances on TJ Hooker and other CBS shows. What stands out most, though, is the author’s pure love of television and movies (he current serves as chairman emeritus of the board of directors of the American Film Institute), which still reflects his childhood awe. His Catholic faith, the humble origins of his parents, and even his grade schoolteachers are also discussed alongside the Hollywood celebrities in the book’s accessible, personal narrative. The text is supplemented by an ample assortment of photographs.
An engaging corporate memoir and love letter to the television industry.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798998796630
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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