A pensive account of a revolution betrayed.
Russian women take one step forward and two steps back in their struggle for equality.
A tenet of the Russian Revolution—ignited, writes Moscow-born American journalist Ioffe, by a strike of women textile workers in 1917—was that women were to be emancipated. They had the right to vote, the right to abortion, the right to no-fault divorce. Nearly a million women, Ioffe notes, fought alongside men in the Red Army, and when Ioffe’s mother entered medical school in 1977, “70 percent of doctors in the Soviet Union were women.” For some men, these rights were immaterial: The head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, was a known serial rapist whom Stalin tolerated even while forbidding his daughter to go to the Beria residence. Beria secured the silence of his victims “with threats of execution or the prospect of their families being sent to the Gulag,” even as other Soviet brass “used their power and access to scarce resources to, essentially, purchase sex.” The statutory freedoms and rights of women have since steadily been whittled away, Ioffe holds, and for numerous reasons. The regime of Vladimir Putin, at once neo-Stalinist and, at least in its nominal devotion to the Orthodox Church, tsarist, has restored women to second-class citizens, with his own wife as his first test case: “He was the leader, and she his eternally obedient subject, his first before he acquired 143 million more.” But some women, Ioffe observes piercingly, are complicit in their own subjugation, in part because men are now a scarce resource themselves, many succumbing in early middle age to deaths of despair, “with only 60 percent of Russian men surviving to the age of sixty.” The shortage of men, “an endangered species,” has yielded desperate competition among women, even as Putin’s draconian regime is considering taxing childlessness to combat one of the world’s lowest birth rates.
A pensive account of a revolution betrayed.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062879127
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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