A remembrance that provides clear insights into one man’s path to business success.
Entrepreneur Haertzen details career choices and offers life lessons.
The author founded the highly successful food and beverage vending company Rocket Man in 1993. He shares his journey to that point, and his later strategies, in this entertaining new memoir, which offers an insider’s look at a hypercompetitive business. In a prologue, he describes a 2007 ordeal at Fort Lauderdale Airport, where he was detained by Transportation Safety Administration officials. Haertzen was carrying $150,000 in cash with him at the time, and the TSA assumed that the cash must have been involved in an illegal venture. Instead, it came from Rocket Man’s successful vending operation at the Super Bowl the previous night. This story provides the starting point for a story that lays out his unique path to success. He describes a childhood in which scarcity was the norm; his father was a child of the Great Depression and brought that mindset to all the economic decisions he made for his family. The Haertzen family lived, dressed, and ate modestly, an upbringing that left the author with a deep sense of resilience and resourcefulness. Mark started work at a young age, delivering newspapers and working in food service at Burger King. Collectively, these experiences led Haertzen to value the hard work put in by employees of all kinds, all of which has helped him to stay humble and empathetic as a business owner.
Haertzen went on to have a successful career in the banking industry in Kentucky before striking out on his own as an entrepreneur. He ran a short-lived coffee shop before embarking on the vending business that became Rocket Man. He says that he found the life of an entrepreneur to be simultaneously freeing and constraining, which is one of the key lessons of this book: Initially, he felt that he had more agency as his own boss, but he soon found himself feeling the stress of financial instability—and he worked harder than he ever did when he was working for someone else. He ended up taking on side hustles, such as consulting, to help support his family while growing Rocket Man. He credits the feedback he received from beverage manufacturers for helping him improve his distribution technology. He effectively gives a blow-by-blow account of the ways that downsizing his operation helped it to grow in a competitive marketplace. At first, the company had both a vending and manufacturing division, but he found that nearly 80 percent of his revenue came from the vending side—so he shed the manufacturing side of things. Over the past two decades, he notes, Rocket Man has become a vending fixture at major sporting and cultural events. In many ways, Haertzen’s book resembles other memoirs by successful entrepreneurs, but the author offers readers much more in his comprehensive explanations of the up and downs of his enterprise. The book will have particular value for those with an interest in the vending industry or the business of big-time sporting events.
A remembrance that provides clear insights into one man’s path to business success.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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