A heartfelt message borne of pain and true sacrifice.
Redefining courage.
In his 2018 memoir, Outside the Wire, Kander shared lessons in courage he learned from serving in the ROTC, the Maryland National Guard, and as an officer during a deployment in Afghanistan from October 2006 to February 2007. For him, being a soldier was “the truest test of manhood,” giving him both a sense of purpose and order. “Every day I was a soldier,” he writes, “was a day I woke up and I knew exactly what I was doing and why I was doing it.” He strived to regain that sense of purpose in politics. He won a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives, was elected as Missouri’s Secretary of State, and was narrowly defeated for the U.S. Senate in 2016. Involved in ethics reform and voting rights, he founded the nonprofit Let America Vote. As he rose in stature, he was urged—including by Barack Obama—to enter the 2020 presidential race. However, as he reveals in a forthright chronicle of intensifying mental illness, years of undiagnosed PTSD sent him plummeting to a nadir of self-hatred. After he returned from Afghanistan, where he had been assigned to intelligence-gathering, he was overwhelmed by debilitating symptoms: night terrors, paranoid fear that someone would harm him or his family, volatile anger, and “unrelenting guilt and punishing shame” because he had not been involved in direct combat. By the time he sought help, he was thinking of suicide. Interwoven with Kander’s narrative are reflections by his wife, who suffered sadness, frustration, and isolation. With the support of therapists and the Veterans Community Project, both the author and his wife came to understand that his dangerous, terrifying experiences in Afghanistan—interviewing men who might kill him or whom he might have to kill—were no less traumatic than physical combat. Kander’s advice is urgent and relevant: “Either you deal with your trauma, or your trauma deals with you.
A heartfelt message borne of pain and true sacrifice.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-65896-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
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 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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