A sprightly and revealing collection by the writer who captured postwar American life, love, and loss.
Missives from the mountain.
Updike was the great American pastoralist of the 20th century. In scores of stories, novels, essays, and poems, he limned the contours of middle-class suburban calm, literary taste, and the recognition that underneath the glossy surfaces of American success lay the insecurities of ambition and desire. Updike was also a prolific letter writer. He wrote to everyone, from famous writers and politicians to librarians and family members. “I can’t believe that you’re cutting ‘Spider-Man,’” he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe in 1994; after the letter, the Globe reinstated the comic strip. Books are never far from Updike’s purview. A letter to the novelist John Irving from 2000 commends him on his negative review of Tom Wolfe’s novel, A Man in Full: “I don’t like writers who fancy themselves dandies.” Modern readers may find Updike too unapologetically masculine these days. He shared with Irving and Norman Mailer a persona of the American writer as big man on campus: “You’re wise to hold to your mountain.” Of the writer Phyllis McGinley, he wrote in 1958: “She seems to have a firm grip on the minds of thousands of housewives.” In 1960, he wrote to the publisher Alfred A. Knopf that his novels sought “to present an image of an averagely physical young American.” He resisted censorship, feeling that to cave to it would be “to funk my job.” At times, though, he can be dead-on in his judgments: “I feel in general that literary history is too much modelled on biology when it is really more like geology. There is not much evolution; there is a great deal of accidental thrusts and upheavals and whatnot and when it’s all over a map is drawn.” Updike may no longer be the mountain he once was. But his letters draw a map of where we once were.
A sprightly and revealing collection by the writer who captured postwar American life, love, and loss.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780593801543
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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