A sometimes-rambling but often affecting remembrance.
Faye recounts a life caught between identities in this debut music memoir.
The Caulfields released two albums with A&M Records during the height of late-1990s alternative rock. Unlike many of their contemporaries, however, the band was fronted by a mixed-race singer/songwriter. Faye was raised in Delaware by a Korean American mother who was 40 years old when he was born; his father was a 62-year-old Irish American ex-cop who died when the author was 6. Faye thought of himself as a perpetual outsider—a sensitive child who felt alienated from White kids he grew up with and from his extended Korean family. He found his voice in rock ’n’ roll, although that path was hardly a simple one to follow. As a lifelong working musician, Faye says, he still feels caught between worlds: “I’m always just one song, one soundtrack, one viral anything from being able to put my kids through college,” he writes in his preface, “or one unforeseen dry patch from having to play ‘Wagon Wheel’ in front of an eighty-inch plasma TV that the bar owner refuses to turn off during my set.” With this memoir, Faye recounts not only “the Caulfields’ fifteen minutes in the spotlight,” but what happened to him before and after it: his confused childhood in the 1970s, the premature demise of his band, and the way music and writing helped him to grapple with subsequent losses in his life. Faye’s prose is even and evocative, particularly in chapters framed as letters to his late mother. Here, he drives past her old house: “Even though the bamboo trees are gone—the ones that used to piss off the neighbors when they sprouted up into their yards—the Japanese maple you planted when I was a teenager is still there, standing as strong as I remember, although the current occupants don’t seem to have the skill or desire to maintain it like you did.” The book sometimes drags a bit due to its length of nearly 450 pages, but Faye’s thoughts on music and family are likely to linger in readers’ minds.
A sometimes-rambling but often affecting remembrance.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781642257434
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Advantage Media Group
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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