A timely reminder of the divine beauty found in everyday life.
Bowen’s spiritual memoir celebrates connecting with the Divine in our everyday lives.
In the book’s opening essay, “In the Beginning,” the author recalls a vision she had at church as a 15-year-old. Before her, surrounded by a “golden, shimmering light,” was Jesus, who she saw “with eyes that are different, my inside eyes.” This apparition, which she refers to as the “Presence,” was the first of many spiritual visions Bowen has experienced in her more than 80 years of life. While detailed descriptions of these mystical experiences take center stage, the book’s real strength lies in the author’s emphasis on connecting with her “Creator” through daily experiences with family, music, and poetry. The essay “Here Now,” for instance, begins with a reflection on the beauty of music, particularly the intertwining of the sacred with creative impulses, and how composers like Bach and Handel wrote their music for the “Glory to God Alone.” Heavily influenced by Christian mystics like Hildegard von Bingen, Bowen’s ecumenical spirituality includes references to thinkers outside the author’s faith, including Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön and Ojibwe novelist Richard Wagamese. The book is profoundly spiritual but never preachy, written in a welcoming style that will appeal to readers across the religious spectrum. The author blends her more esoteric musings with down-to-earth ruminations on her career as an occupational therapist and her familial role as a mother and wife. Another essay, “Thresholds,” survey’s Bowen’s conflicting emotions after being diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing a mastectomy. “I feel like I am on a roller coaster,” she tells her husband while on a run; “Sometimes I’m soaring, sometimes I’m terrified.” At just over 100 pages, the text strikes a successful balance between reveling in the simplicities of life and acknowledging the profound. The author of the 2002 genealogical memoir The Space Between (2002) in addition to academic textbooks, Bowen is a skilled writer whose prose manages to combine accessibility with elegance and a keen sense of esoteric mysticism born of a lifetime of spiritual contemplation and meditation.
A timely reminder of the divine beauty found in everyday life.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798891321540
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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