A fine collection of essays on identity, at once wide-ranging and site-specific.
A Greek American considers her family and identity through the lens of her family’s homeland of Cyprus.
In this winning and contemplative collection, Eleftheriou considers her divided self in a variety of ways. She’s a New Yorker who’s still deeply connected to Cyprus, where her father grew up and where she spent much of her childhood. She’s Greek but formed by American culture, especially books by writers like Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s an out lesbian but still bearing the weight of religious and cultural dictates that kept her closeted for years. In one essay, she finds an effective metaphor for this split in Cyprus itself, which remains divided into Greek and Turkish sections; taking a road trip into the Turkish north, she considers questions of betrayal, history, secrets, and grudges. “The island is like a human bone that has been badly broken but that no doctor ever set,” she writes. But Eleftheriou feels free to rove around a variety of subjects, letting the theme of division emerge rather than announce it. She discusses the firebrand actress Melina Mercouri, at once a Hollywood glamour queen and outspoken critic of the 1970s Greek dictatorship; family squabbles over her late father’s property emphasize an unsettled sense of place. It’s all intimate and a touch mournful, most powerfully so when the author writes about her sexuality. Cyprus did not have a pride parade until 2014, with marchers facing violent attacks and persecution. Much of Eleftheriou’s writing on the subject is candid about finding her voice and standing her ground amid a homophobic culture. (She recalls a Greek Orthodox priest telling her being gay was “like being deformed.”) A more chronological arrangement would clarify her family history and personal journey, but in any order, these essays reveal an impassioned and hard-fought sense of self and place.
A fine collection of essays on identity, at once wide-ranging and site-specific.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949199-66-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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