An engaging and enlightening travel account about a family’s global journey.
A travel book by a mother and her two daughters focuses on the family’s five-month trip around the world and the lessons learned along the way.
The McIntyres’ autobiographical work is written from the perspectives of teenagers Delaney and Riley. The girls recount that they weren’t sure how they felt about their parents’ plans to take them out of middle school and go “on a global family field trip.” The girls really weren’t surprised, as they knew how much their parents loved to travel, but they worried about what they would miss at home. The family had ventured to foreign countries before, and readers get a glimpse of a previous trip to Panama. After their parents included London on the itinerary, the girls acquiesced. The family traveled to a diverse array of countries and had some scary, thrilling, and eye-opening experiences. First, they went to Europe. In Iceland, they visited geothermal springs and a geyser; in England, they trekked to Stonehenge, the Tower of London, and the Harry Potter sets at the Warner Bros. Studio; in Italy, they explored the Colosseum and Vatican City. Then they moved on to Asia, where they immediately noticed a difference between their clothes and those of the locals. They were also surprised by the Christmas decorations in Malaysia and the traffic rules in Vietnam. In Australia and New Zealand, they got to hold a koala bear, bungee jump, and scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef before finishing their trip via Indonesia and China. In this engrossing book, the teens insightfully express key lessons, such as “every country gets to tell their version of history,” which they learned at a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. The richly detailed, educational work is a wonderful resource for families considering a similar experience. The volume could be given to tweens or teens to help them ready themselves for the adventure and to build anticipation and commitment to the endeavor. Maps, family photographs, and a “report card” section listing the travelers’ most and least favorite experiences in each country are excellent inclusions.
An engaging and enlightening travel account about a family’s global journey.Pub Date: March 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73774-381-1
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Shamrock House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
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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