A woman’s intimate and often inspiring journey to wellness.
A mother of young daughters chronicles her fight against two aggressive cancers and the personal growth that helps bring her through it.
When a cancer diagnosis arrives, patients can either eschew the internet (as doctors often recommend) or they can dive deep into learning as much as possible about their disease. Speaker, reiki master teacher, and integrative health coach Bero chose the latter when she was diagnosed at age 42 with late-stage inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and fast-growing cancer that’s often mistaken for an infection. The treatment is the familiar trifecta of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. Bero kept journals, documenting with exquisite detail the effects of the toxic chemicals, burns from radiation, issues with her family, and more. The following year, she was diagnosed with another aggressive cancer in her head and neck that required immediate, risky surgery. Bero remains relatable in these pages as she tells of alternately lashing out in frustration, being bowled over by love for her family, advocating for herself, or sleeping in drug-induced relief. She also became a spiritual seeker, studying alternative ways to both alleviate damage to her body from these therapies and help prevent a cancer recurrence. She embraced mindfulness meditation, received reiki therapy in an attempt to pull toxic energy out of her body, and learned which foods are said to help fight cancer. This personal evolution gets her through the ordeal, she says, noting “the overwhelming sense of joy and peace I had from knowing that I was doing everything I could to stay disease free.” Over the course of the book, whose title is an acronym for “Evolve, Advocate, Transform,” the author’s story is slowed by anecdotes that seem unrelated to the healing journey, such as an account of a time when her neighbor’s cows ended up in her yard in Wisconsin. However, readers who are cancer patients themselves or are interested in a patient’s experience will find that this book has real value. More than 15 years after her first diagnosis, Bero remains healthy.
A woman’s intimate and often inspiring journey to wellness.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1986609289
Page Count: 274
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
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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