Another scathing exposé of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic.
A second tell-all memoir from the former president’s niece.
Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, expands her vehemently critical assessment of her family outward after the first memoir, Too Much and Never Enough, skewered Uncle Donald. With raw authenticity and bracing detail, she painstakingly reveals the devastating psychological impact of the Trump clan's outraged reaction to her first tell-all, which forced her to check herself into a treatment program utilizing experimental ketamine therapy. Three years prior, she’d had treatment for “intensive trauma” and a dissociation condition, all exacerbated by the fact that “Donald Trump is my uncle.” Looking inward, she peels back the traumatic layers of her early life growing up in Jamaica, New York, with parents Freddy, a commercial airline pilot, and Linda, a flight attendant. Sadly, her parents’ idyllic romance curdled beneath the constant mockery and “stifling control and blanket disapproval” of her grandfather, real estate mogul Fred Trump, the “unaffectionate” family patriarch. Eventually the author would grieve for her parents, who each suffered with personal demons, particularly her father, who succumbed to alcoholism and died prematurely at age 42. Ordeals with chronic asthma attacks (which were ignored by her dismissive mother), sexual harassment from a neighbor, and an indifferent family forced her to shut out the world around her and “turn inward.” With blistering frankness, Trump elaborates on the melodrama surrounding her grandfather’s will and the numerous lawsuits (“my family’s love language”) that ensued after Donald and his siblings calculatedly stole her and her father’s inheritance from her grandfather’s estate. Trump, who is openly gay and a mother to a grown daughter, doesn’t skimp on the jarring, revelatory details of her toxic family, telling her truths with lucidity despite the narrative’s relentlessly despondent tone and texture. She unpacks the baseline origins of her debilitating stress, self-loathing, and self-isolation in a heartless clan that apparently couldn’t care less about her.
Another scathing exposé of the enduring fallout from a poisonous, dysfunctional family dynamic.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781250278470
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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