A welcome update of classic works on California’s arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.
A sensitive, thoughtful portrait of a part of California that few people see—or want to.
The area around Bishop, California, was robbed of its water decades ago to fuel the growth of greater Los Angeles. That is the central fact of Atleework’s celebration of a place swept by vast dust storms and economic dislocation, its neighboring mountains prone to burst into flames at a moment’s notice. Another central fact is a family that is indisputably eccentric but perfectly suited to the place. “Every family cultivates a culture and lives by its own strangeness until the strangeness turns normal and the rest of the world looks a little off,” she writes, and the aperçu is exactly right. Her mother labored for years under the death sentence of a little-understood cancer while her father sold maps he made and explored the surrounding country with the inquisitive intensity of a 19th-century surveyor. All deserts are places of absence, but the desert of the Eastern Sierra is more lacking than most. As Atleework writes, “In my first five years of life, less than twelve inches of precipitation fell.” And yet, as one environmentalist remarks, the fact that LA takes away such little water as the place can deliver means that growth is something for other places to experience. The locals like it that way just fine, by Atleework’s sometimes repetitive account. One who traveled to LA for medical treatment returned appalled by the smog and traffic, even more so by plans to desalinate ocean water to sustain still more growth. “Imagine this state with unlimited water,” he told the author. “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” It makes a fine motto for a region that Atleework clearly loves.
A welcome update of classic works on California’s arid backcountry by Mary Austin, Marc Reisner, and Reyner Banham.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-998-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
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
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