A pleasant bibliophilic excursion, as books about books usually are.
The director of Chicago’s renowned Seminary Co-op Bookstore ponders the ingredients that make a bookstore worth visiting.
“We no longer need bookstores to buy books, even serious books,” writes Deutsch. “In fact, bookstores might well be an inefficient and inconvenient way to buy books in the twenty-first century.” That is, of course, because we have Amazon, with its long tail and ability to stock every one of the millions of books on the market. That does not mean, writes the author, that we should surrender to Leviathan and abandon those inefficient bookstores. Amazon’s dominance comes at a cost to literate culture, including the loss of the ability to browse the shelves and consult a bookseller who knows the stock. “What an unparalleled activity it is to browse a bookstore in a state of curiosity and receptivity, chewing one’s intellectual cud!” Deutsch exults. A brick-and-mortar bookstore allows plenty of room for such browsing within the bounds of a curated collection, for it can’t hold everything. Deutsch notes that his bookstore sold 28,000 titles in 2019, and almost 17,000 of those were single copies. The single copy speaks to the single reader, and the author sagely allows that the principal work of the bookseller is to anticipate the needs and moods of the solitary browser. It’s thanks to online competition, rising costs, a clogged supply chain, and many other such matters that physical bookstores have to carry things like coffee and greeting cards, but these are essential to the bottom line, much as purists may scoff at them. By Deutsch’s accounting, sidelines comprise about a fifth of a bookstore’s income. Bookstores are more than mere sites of commerce, of course: They’re places of community, and, as the author memorably closes his argument, the books they sell are “exceptional tools to cultivate our own interior landscape, which, after all, is our portable and permanent homeland.”
A pleasant bibliophilic excursion, as books about books usually are.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-20776-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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 charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.
The late heavy metal legend considers his mortality in this posthumous memoir.
“I ain’t ready to go anywhere,” writes Osbourne in the opening pages of his new memoir. “It’s good being alive. I like it. I want to be here with my family.” Given the context—Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, two weeks after the publisher announced the news of this book—it’s undeniably sad. But the rest of the text sees the Black Sabbath singer confronting the health struggles of his last years with dark humor and something approaching grace. The memoir begins in 2018; he wrote an earlier one, I Am Ozzy, in 2010. He tells of a staph infection he suffered that proved to be the start of a long, painful battle with various illnesses—soon after, he contracted a flu, which morphed into pneumonia. A spinal injury caused by a fall followed, causing him to undergo a series of surgeries and leaving him struggling with intense pain. And then there was his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the treatment of which was complicated by his longtime struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Osbourne peppers the chronicle of his final years with anecdotes from his past, growing up in Birmingham, England, and playing with—and then being fired from—Black Sabbath, and some of his most well-known antics (yes, he does address biting the heads off of a dove and a bat). He writes candidly and regretfully about the time he viciously attacked his wife, Sharon—the book is in many ways a love letter to her and his children. The memoir showcases Osbourne’s wit and charm; it’s rambling and disorganized, but so was he. It functions as both a farewell and a confession, and fans will likely find much to admire in this account. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781538775417
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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