An informative but dry account of a life rich with experience and purpose.
An African American engineer traces his progression from a farming background in Jim Crow Florida to academia in this debut memoir.
The author was born in 1938 on the family farm in Sawdust, a rural community in northwest Florida. In the book’s opening pages, he describes riding the school bus to middle school and seeing a cross that had been burned on a property owned by a black family—a chilling reminder that the Ku Klux Klan was active in his county. Remembering a time when “blacks entered a white person’s house through the back door,” he also recounts the simple pleasures of childhood, such as learning to make his own toys, including “popguns, slingshots,” and “baseballs.” Despite graduating from high school as salutatorian, Thigpen found few alternatives to working on the farm. As soon as he was old enough, he volunteered for the Army, where he was deployed to West Germany in 1956. His active duty ended nearly three years later, and he returned to America, taking laborer work before becoming an engineering student. In 1970, the author received a Ph.D. and went on to become chair of the department of mechanical engineering at Howard University. Thigpen’s autobiography deftly offers a disturbing first-person record of segregation. Regarding looking for construction work, he writes: “I followed up but was told that their company did not hire blacks.” The book also skillfully pays tribute to the author’s perseverance and ingenuity, describing how he used his knowledge of algebra and trigonometry to find work laying out farm plots. But while Thigpen’s journey is an intriguing one, it is sometimes flatly described. The author crafts inelegant sentences that often include unnecessary repetition: “Our cousin Aunt Addie’s youngest son—Donald (‘Pat’)—took us to gather wood for cooking and heating in an area on our farm next to the property on the south side of our farm.” Thigpen also has a tendency to digress, providing unimportant facts that serve only as filler: “The next day, a Saturday, John and I spent most of the day moving a woman friend of his sister to a new location.” Illustrated with family photographs, the author’s story is one of significant achievement but his writing at times falls a bit short.
An informative but dry account of a life rich with experience and purpose. (appendix)Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72832-960-4
Page Count: 332
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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