A memoir full of striking reflections on the procedural and personal realities of death.
A medicolegal investigator examines a life and career marked by death.
Parker opens his memoir with a death notice, something he became all too familiar with as both a police officer and later as a medicolegal investigator. The author takes readers back to his complicated childhood in Philadelphia in the late 1970s, where, per Parker, he grew up with a violent father and grandparents who offered both stability and abuse. He writes that his grandmother, in particular, established a template for insecurity and cruelty that shaped his life. (“If she loved me, why treat me as if I was an intruder? Less than an animal?” he asks.) From those early years, the author developed a morbid fascination with death that would follow him through throughout his history. After moving to Arizona, Parker began working for the local police department; at just 18, he found purpose in the job but also sustained deep emotional wounds. In one particularly violent encounter, a suspect managed to escape with the author’s own gun and jacket, leaving him shaken and uncertain about his future. His despondency led him to join the medicolegal death investigations program as a transporter, where his daily work involved moving bodies and confronting the physical realities of death. (He writes of “crock pot–style container[s] full of putrid, boiling fluid” and describes how the smells and textures of decomposition became routine in grisly detail.) Parker relied on the gallows humor he had learned from his grandmother to cope with the work, and he remained fascinated by the science of determining causes of death. His career took him from Arizona to California as he investigated the “unusual, unexpected, and, quite frankly, sometimes unfathomable ways people die.” The author recounts misidentifications, departmental failures, and the emotional toll of years spent in proximity to death, leading up to 2019, when Parker finally admitted to struggling with alcoholism, PTSD, and depression. As he narrates moving between hospitalizations and treatments, he also confronts the lifelong impact of death on his work and his identity.
Parker writes with frankness and unflinching intensity about his tumultuous childhood, delivering details that pull the reader in over the course of the startling incidents he describes—he recalls, for instance, that his father once considered murdering him and other family members—but he also offsets the horror with moments of dark, surprising humor. The image of his crass grandmother squatting over a sink to urinate, “us[ing] a step stool to climb onto it,” captures the chaos and absurdity that defined his early life. When discussing his years as a police officer, the author demonstrates a strong command of pacing and tone, blending police-style factual precision with emotional immediacy. His reflection on one violent encounter—A “very calm voice in my head reminded me of the 1991 Rodney King incident and resulting riots the year before”—demonstrates his insight and social awareness and illustrates how he analyzes his career through several different lenses. His descriptions of decomposing bodies are graphic, gripping, and certain to appeal to readers drawn to the macabre, but what distinguishes Parker’s prose is its balance—each grisly or shocking detail ultimately circles back to something deeply personal, grounding his storytelling in self-awareness and the psychological toll of confronting death.
A memoir full of striking reflections on the procedural and personal realities of death.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781544547947
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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