A graceful meditation on memory.
Snapshots of a life of artistic creation.
Journalist Malcolm (1934-2021), a photographer and collage artist as well as an award-winning writer, uses images of family and friends to create a memoir as elusive as it is revealing. “Autobiography,” she wrote, “is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines.” Looking at photographs of herself as a child, of her parents and sister, she often admits to the vagueness of her recollections. “Most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” she observes. “The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” What she does remember coheres as a portrait of the émigré Czech community in New York in the 1940s. She and her family came to the U.S. in 1939 and settled in Yorkville, where her father, a doctor, treated the immigrant community in that upper Manhattan neighborhood. Besides public school—as a teenager, she went to the High School of Music and Art—Malcolm was sent to learn Czech; but though her parents wanted to ensure her connection to her heritage, they only belatedly told her she was Jewish. She and her sister were dismayed: “We had internalized the anti-Semitism in the culture and were shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the ‘good’ side of the equation.” Malcolm portrays her father as kind and patient, her mother as needy and volatile. Family life was happy, but “all happy families are alike in the pain their members helplessly inflict upon one another, as if under orders from a perverse higher authority.” If some memories are swathed in the innocence of childhood perception, some seem deliberately obscured. “I would rather flunk a writing test,” Malcolm admits, “than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.” What she does expose are sharp observations rendered in the precise, stylish prose that earned her acclaim.
A graceful meditation on memory.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60513-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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