A sophisticated and thought-provoking story of the emergence of a young writer.
Novelist and playwright Kasten, author of A Little Something for Everyone (2020),recounts her idyllic childhood and college career.
The author writes this remembrance in the third person, calling herself Annie Lang and changing other people’s names. As the book opens in 1950, the Langs have moved to an Iowa college town where Annie’s dad now works as a business manager at a university. Their three-story house and oversized backyard are full of natural and human-made wonders. Her parents are kind to each other and to their kids and never argue. They answer all questions posed to them, even embarrassing ones, in a matter-of-fact way. By virtue of being near the university, Annie immerses herself in a cultural wonderland and gets the lead roles in several plays at the institution. Years pass, and the young, self-styled intellectual enrolls at the small Carroll College, the “Harvard of the Midwest.” There, and in a study-abroad program in London,she grows as a writer and thinker and meets a lanky physics major who also likes classical music and the work of comedians Mike Nichols and Elaine May. As their relationship blossoms, the self-aware Annie wrestles with questions of sex, marriage, and morality. Kasten’s charming memoir, written in a series of engaging vignettes, effectively focuses on those moments, big and small, that mold a person into who they truly are. Her talent for succinct description is impressive throughout, as when she tells of loving a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which inspired her to leap around her living room, “ending her performance by sinking like a fallen soufflé in the middle of the living room rug. She does not require an audience.” She similarly sketches other figures in her life in vivid, generous detail. Annie’s introspection carries the story as she debates rapidly evolving 1950s and ’60s norms and develops a greater sense of self. The work could have rallied a bit more enthusiasm toward its conclusion, but the overall richness of the account makes for gratifying reading.
A sophisticated and thought-provoking story of the emergence of a young writer.Pub Date: June 14, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 306
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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