A heart-rending journey recalled with lucidity and poise.
The course of an opera singer’s life is altered after being diagnosed with a rare cancer in Watt’s memoir.
In the winter of 1997, the author was on a ski holiday with her partner, Evie, when she decided to share a secret with her. Playfully placing Evie’s finger on her gumline, she guided her to a bump at the back of her upper jaw. Thinking little of it, other than to schedule a dentist appointment, the two returned to New York. By day, Watt worked as a magazine assistant art director, but by night shared the stage with the likes of Dame Gwyneth Jones as a Metropolitan Opera extra chorister. After undergoing tests, the author received a fraught call from her oral surgeon telling her that she needed to get to a head and neck surgeon immediately. Watt was later diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma. The memoir details the singer’s protracted treatment and recovery from the “savagely aggressive” cancer that involved months of chemotherapy and surgeries that damaged her facial features during tumor extraction. Her opera career prematurely ended, Watt mourned the loss of the “all-absorbing, bodily immersion of singing.” The author describes a “never-ending” facial reconstruction process, reckoning with society’s standards for physical beauty, and “coming back to life after routing the Big C.” Watt is a sharply descriptive writer who is unafraid to address the horror of her treatment: “he worked as much as possible below or behind my sight line, saving me the trauma of watching incoming sharp instruments and suction hoses and bloody junk.” Unapologetically frank, the author also has a wry, sometimes self-effacing sense of humor that brings levity to a distressing subject. On wearing an eyepatch in public, Watt notes: “Even when I was teased by a pack of teenagers, I preferred hearing them laugh at each other’s best pirate impression to being invisible. Arrrrrr! andAvast me hearties! and Ahoy Matie!” The result is a finely textured and courageous literary memoir that is inspirational and, at times, darkly amusing.
A heart-rending journey recalled with lucidity and poise.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 469
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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