A gripping, insightful reckoning with America’s original sin.
Debut author Gibbs blends family history and memoir in this nonfiction exploration of the legacy of Southern racism.
“So, why did your daddy kill himself?” a family member asks the author in the opening lines of the book. This jarring question sets the stage for a Southern Gothic memoir in which Gibbs seeks to understand his father’s death by piecing together his own childhood in the South and his family’s connection to the lynching of John Henry Williams in 1921. The author’s devious grandmother, Memaw, emerges as the book’s unsympathetic antagonist, along with her father and brothers, who, she alleges, took part in the lynching. While the book’s narrative of racial violence and generational trauma provides some of its most engrossing passages, Gibbs also excels at analyzing his family’s internal psychology. For instance, his often-homeless father, who struggled for years with alcoholism and an “utter lack of purpose,” is not a stereotypically compelling figure; the author’s depiction, however, limns a tortured, brilliant man who could not escape his family’s history and the place they called home. His “big brain,” the author speculates, “had nothing to do but grind itself to death in the benighted ignorance of backwoods Florida.” As for Gibbs, he left the United States after graduating college, spending his adulthood in Tokyo, India, and, currently, Turkey. With a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, and as the author of more than a dozen published stories, essays, and poems, Gibbs is a talented writer who effectively evokes the Old South through his compelling storytelling. The text doubles as a fascinating interrogation of autobiography as Gibbs questions “well-crafted” memoirs in which the author’s memory is “cleansed of chaos and uncertainty”—just as white Southerners have often misremembered history to fit their own internalized narratives. The author also introduces readers to the Japanese practice of zuihitsu(translated as “follow the pen”), which explores the power of memory and history through free association. While at times scattered due to the author’s stream-of-consciousness approach, this family history is a tour de force.
A gripping, insightful reckoning with America’s original sin.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781953932297
Page Count: 284
Publisher: April Gloaming Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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
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