An intricately woven, if sometimes-jarring, tale of two lives coming together.
Tonetti Dorra offers a memoir of herself and her late husband that takes readers along on their life journey and shows how their paths came to cross.
The author first details, in her late husband Henri Dorra’s voice, how her future spouse left Alexandria, Egypt, studied engineering at the University of London and Harvard University, and eventually became a director of the University of California, Los Angeles, art museum, meeting his future wife in the early 1960s. Tonetti Dorra’s memoir describes her youth in Texas, her time at Vassar College, travels abroad, and her eventually becoming an Italian language teaching assistant at UCLA and meeting Henri. The use of vivid descriptions brings their experiences to life; reader will be able to easily picture both of their experiences and feel their moments of calm, as when Henri’s father compared the ripples of the waves to “dunes undulating along the coast as far as the eye could see,” or anxiety, as when Henri describes the terrifying moments when he and his mother evacuated from France to Britain during World War II with “hearts pounding and heads held high.” The juxtaposition of the author’s and Henri’s lived experiences can be jolting, especially at the beginning, when Henri’s life is being upended by Nazi invasion while the author’s own story speaks of her family’s Christmas cards. The alternation between the stories also effectively highlights other stark differences in their experiences. Readers see, for instance, how the author is able to easily brush off antisemitic conflicts in her young adulthood, as when her friend Gloria wasn’t allowed to join a sorority because she was Jewish; this was not an option for Henri, whose family was Jewish, as when the dean of Cambridge University told him that “it would be an extraordinary exception to his principles to admit [him].” Readers should be aware that a few reconstructed conversations in the White author’s remembrances of her Texas upbringing recall others using racial slurs, and the narration, at one point, problematically refers to Black people as “the blacks.”
An intricately woven, if sometimes-jarring, tale of two lives coming together.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73743-620-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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