A revealing portrait of an uncommon and troubled life.
Bennett, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author for Crimewarps: The Future of Crime in America (1987), explores the life of an eclectic relative and Holocaust survivor in this biography.
The subject of this book, who was born in 1922 and died in 2015, went by many names throughout his life, reflecting his quest for identity—Gerd Phillipsohn, Gerald Phillips, Gary, and Pips (the name preferred by the author). He was raised in Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter; his mother was a German Lutheran, and his father was Jewish. As he entered his teenage years in 1935, writes Bennett, he was struck by the “pintele yid,” or “Jewish spark” within him that was “kindled by the rising antisemitism that engulfed his world.” The same week that the Nazis enacted the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, Pips would embrace the faith of his father and have a bar mitzvah. Most of his teenage and young adult years were spent hiding in Berlin, “in the belly of the Nazi beast.” This biography’s first part, “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide” centers on Pips' life during World War II. Over nine chapters, Bennett chronicles her subject’s wartime experiences in detail: He was captured by the Gestapo four times and escaped three German prisons, and he had an uncanny ability to charm his captors, which saved his life. The book’s second half, “From a Nightmare to a Dream and Back,” focuses on his later life in New York City with his wife, Olga, whom he met in a displaced persons camp. Pips went from working as a waiter and bicycle messenger to eventually co-owning Globe Photos, one of the world’s largest photo agencies.
It would be easy for Bennett’s deeply personal work to lean into hagiography, celebrating a Holocaust survivor’s postwar connections to some of Hollywood’s brightest stars, but what makes this book special is its honest portrayal of Pips’ life, “warts and all.” Bennett and Pips were distantly related as third cousins-in-law, but they considered each other close family, given that so many of their relatives had been killed in the Holocaust: “He thought of himself variously as my father and uncle,” she writes. Built partially on a lifetime of memories, the book also draws on dozens of audiotapes that Pips recorded with his psychiatrist, which he left to her. Although the work often focuses on Pips’ perspective, Bennett doesn’t shy away from parts of his story that made her uncomfortable; for example, he was a “serial kisser” of women without their consent (“For Pips, sneaking a peck on the cheek was akin to being a big game hunter bagging his prey”). He also regularly visited sex workers at strip clubs. Bennett, an author and TED Talk speaker and the founding president of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, is an empathetic writer who highlights notable aspects of a major figure in her life while still addressing his personal flaws and his psychological struggle with his self-identification as a “half-Jew” who “spent his life trying to shed his ‘goyishe’ side.”
A revealing portrait of an uncommon and troubled life.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781949846744
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Heresy Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2025
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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