Disturbing, frightening, and emotionally charged, but tender and highly informative.
Levine recollects the painful days of her daughter’s life-threatening struggle with anorexia.
The author met her husband, Mark, when she was 27; she was a charge nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit, and he was a medical student with a winning smile. They married three years later and had two children, first Mike and then Rachel. Their family was close, with minimal acrimony. In retrospect, however, Levine identifies certain family patterns, combined with what is likely a genetic predisposition for addictive and/or compulsive behavior, that created a fertile field for anorexia to gain its terrifying foothold. The symptoms of Rachel’s eating disorder appeared gradually—the author pegs the first observable hints to a 2006 family trip to Australia, where Rachel was taking her semester abroad. But the red flags—she had lost weight, was becoming an obsessive runner like her father, and was rejecting high-caloric food—were easily dismissed. She was healthy and happy. However, by the time she returned to the Levine home in Vermont several months later, she had lost more weight. Levine began to study the symptoms, psychology, and devastating physical consequences of anorexia, which include bone loss and heart and kidney damage. It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Rachel would willingly enter an eating disorder treatment center. Levine’s memoir is a highly personal and vivid account of the period leading up to and including the 10 months Rachel spent in the center. It is written with love and a bold honesty about generational family history and dynamics. The book contains a wealth of information about the illness, and, supplemented by Rachel’s commentary and excerpts from her journals, it presents an intimate look at anorexia’s psychological underpinnings—the anxieties, the hidden sadness, and the persistent inner “voice” that kept telling her she was never perfect enough (“How could you have let yourself go? …You messed up. You’re a failure”), encouraged her to control every morsel she ate, and pushed her to dangerously unhealthy levels of exercise.
Disturbing, frightening, and emotionally charged, but tender and highly informative.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781578692064
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
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
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