A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist.
Reenvisioning the life of a major 20th-century writer and civil rights icon.
The reputation of James Baldwin (1924-1987) waxed and waned over his lifetime—and beyond. He began as the promising young author of the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) before emerging as a crucial “witness” to the civil rights struggle, electrifying readers with his book-length essay The Fire Next Time (1963). Yet his frank treatment of homosexuality in novels like Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962) discomfited publishers and critics, and he struck some younger Black radicals as passé. His late fiction was roundly (and unfairly) dismissed. In recent years, the advent of Black Lives Matter and a host of new critical studies have forced us to rethink Baldwin. The author of this vibrant new biography divides his “Love Story” into discrete sections named for four men in the subject’s life: painter Beauford Delaney, an early mentor and “spiritual father”; Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss man he called “the love of my life,” whose emotional support enabled him to complete Giovanni’s Room; Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor and “blood brother” who offered refuge in Istanbul during the turbulent ’60s; and Yoran Cazac, an enigmatic French artist and collaborator on Little Man, Little Man, a 1976 picture book. (Boggs played a decisive role in the book’s 2018 reissue and interrupts the narrative to recount his efforts to locate and interview Cazac, a backstory that might have been more effective as an afterword.) Boggs establishes Baldwin as a restless writer who publicly “forced readers to confront the connections between white supremacy, masculinity, and sexuality” while privately seeking the “redemptive power of love” with other men, gay, straight, and bisexual.
A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780374178710
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
