This charming autobiography of personal struggles during times of career success and challenge deserves a big thumbs-up.
The beloved actor, director, and producer tells his warm-hearted story.
Life after being the Fonz wasn’t all happy days for Winkler (b. 1945), but this well-crafted autobiography—complete with welcome interjections from Stacey, his wife of 45 years—shows how the acclaimed yet anxious actor learned how to be cool. This is no celebrity tell-all. The author regularly holds back on names or distinguishing details when he offers unflattering tales about anyone other than himself. Instead, he goes deep into his troubled relationship with his Holocaust–surviving parents, his long-undiagnosed dyslexia, and his struggle to find work following his superstar breakthrough as Arthur Fonzarelli in Happy Days. Whether he’s relaying a difficult stretch of his life; how he came to co-author the Hank Zipzer children’s book series; or how he landed the memorable roles of Barry Zuckerkorn on Arrested Development and Gene Cousineau on Barry, Winkler tells stories like he would at a dinner with friends. One minute, he’s discussing his role in Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy; the next, it’s a failed meeting with Neil Simon. In a less genuine writer’s hands, the chapter in which he discusses the family dogs and how they interact with him and each other could come across as filler. With Winkler, it’s clearly a deeply felt explanation of his love for Linus, Charlotte, Hamlet, Scruffy, and Ringo. The author also offers plenty of occasionally offbeat but largely sage advice. “When I give talks these days, I say, ‘Your head knows some things; your tummy knows everything’,” he writes. “I say it to kindergarteners, I say it to seniors. I say it to everybody, because it is the law of living.” Winkler’s current late-career, Emmy–winning resurgence shows that his tummy knows what it’s doing.
This charming autobiography of personal struggles during times of career success and challenge deserves a big thumbs-up.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781250888099
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
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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