The wilderness comes alive on the page in this (literal) trailblazer’s memoir.
Cooper offers a memoir of successfully pursuing passions.
Though he received a full scholarship after graduating high school in 1971, the author took a detour to embrace his interests in music and exploring some of America’s most remote wild places. The detour became an adventurous road that he ably chronicles in this memoir. Leaving behind his Long Island, New York, nightclub-junk-food-drug-filled life for healthy living in California, he encountered the first of his travels’ trials in 1978, when a poisonous scorpion sting sustained in remote Yelapa, Mexico, led to a near-death experience and a spiritual awakening. After recovering in Long Island, he returned to California. Backpacking en route to the Great Western Divide in 1980, Cooper saw a backpacker who had navigated an off-trail course; this was “the inspiration for [the author] becoming an expert cross-country navigator, planning and executing over the following decades scores of remote wilderness routes far from paint-by-number trails.” In 1981, he moved to Oregon, where he was successful as an audio engineer and could pursue his wilderness adventures. Classes and expeditions with the Sierra Club and the Obsidians (a club devoted to outdoor experiences in the Pacific Northwest) improved his mountaineering skills. With like-minded friends, he organized a series of risky and sardonically named Desert Death Marches, starting in 1994 with a 50-mile expedition through the Joshua Tree National Monument and culminating in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park in 2015. By then, at age 61, health issues and years of rugged backpacking had taken a toll on his body. Whether climbing, backpacking, whitewater rafting, or undergoing brain surgery, Cooper portrays his adventures in immersive detail. His descriptions of his experiences in untouched areas are lyrical: “I had that priceless feeling one gets only in very remote wilderness: a deep and abiding calm, primitively simple and absent of thought, unshackled from all obligation and carefree.” Throughout the book, the author depicts his friends and family with empathy. Lovers of the outdoors and armchair travelers alike will enjoy adventuring along with him.
The wilderness comes alive on the page in this (literal) trailblazer’s memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2025
ISBN: 9798998909504
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Larrea Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
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 charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.
The late heavy metal legend considers his mortality in this posthumous memoir.
“I ain’t ready to go anywhere,” writes Osbourne in the opening pages of his new memoir. “It’s good being alive. I like it. I want to be here with my family.” Given the context—Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, two weeks after the publisher announced the news of this book—it’s undeniably sad. But the rest of the text sees the Black Sabbath singer confronting the health struggles of his last years with dark humor and something approaching grace. The memoir begins in 2018; he wrote an earlier one, I Am Ozzy, in 2010. He tells of a staph infection he suffered that proved to be the start of a long, painful battle with various illnesses—soon after, he contracted a flu, which morphed into pneumonia. A spinal injury caused by a fall followed, causing him to undergo a series of surgeries and leaving him struggling with intense pain. And then there was his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the treatment of which was complicated by his longtime struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Osbourne peppers the chronicle of his final years with anecdotes from his past, growing up in Birmingham, England, and playing with—and then being fired from—Black Sabbath, and some of his most well-known antics (yes, he does address biting the heads off of a dove and a bat). He writes candidly and regretfully about the time he viciously attacked his wife, Sharon—the book is in many ways a love letter to her and his children. The memoir showcases Osbourne’s wit and charm; it’s rambling and disorganized, but so was he. It functions as both a farewell and a confession, and fans will likely find much to admire in this account. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781538775417
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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