A heartbreaking remembrance written in powerful, poetic language.
In this memoir, a woman attempts to piece together the puzzle of her mysterious grandmother.
Gerber’s maternal grandmother died of heart failure at the age of 92—but despite a long life, she remained an enigma even to those who were closest to her. The author knew her grandmother was born somewhere in Ukraine in 1895—possibly Ekaterinoslav in the Pale of Settlement—but Gerber never established this conclusively. At the age of 8, she survived a vicious pogrom directed against Jews—the author’s grandmother was Jewish—and when only 15, she was compelled to flee her homeland and family, never to return. She made her way by ship to Philadelphia and was apparently rechristened Bessie Katz, but even this fundamental fact eludes confirmation. Bessie married Philip Siman, a tailor, and they lived “in a strange new land where their foreignness and their Jewishness and their poverty made them objects of suspicion and disdain.” Gerber loved her grandmother deeply and sought from her the affection and attention she couldn’t pry from her own mother. Nevertheless, Bessie never discussed with her or anyone else the details of her life before she came to the United States, and since she was illiterate, she couldn’t record them. An impenetrable silence enveloped her like a dense fog, though her own trauma lived on in her three children, including Gerber’s mother, who suffered from a deep depression. The author’s account is necessarily impressionistic—with journalistic tenacity and emotional poignancy, she gathered what little evidence there was of Bessie’s mysterious life. But Gerber paints a vivid tableau of what life was like in the U.S. for Jewish refugees who faced ferocious antisemitism and were often condemned to lonely, alienated lives of quiet shame. The author’s brief portrait—well under 100 pages—is an affecting homage to the woman she so profoundly loved though hardly knew.
A heartbreaking remembrance written in powerful, poetic language.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Apprentice House
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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