A charming memoir of a quietly transformative year.
Looking at the world through knitting.
Journalist Orenstein, whose previous subjects include boys, girls, and sex, offers a wry, candid memoir of the year 2020, when the pandemic lockdown, her father’s deepening dementia, her daughter’s upcoming departure for college, and the threat of wildfires to her California home urged her to think hard about her life. At 58, aging, too, was on her mind when she decided to plunge into a new, challenging project: learning to shear a sheep, process the fleece, and knit a sweater. Shearing required courage and brawn, she quickly learned, and the mound of wool she managed to glean was only the beginning of a long process that involved cleaning (fleece was rife with manure, insects, and soil), carding, spinning, and dyeing (making her own dye from leaves and flowers). Spinning involved considerable trial and error, but when she mastered it—“pinching, pulling, smoothing back”—she felt “suffused with well-being, with a profound sense of peace, not dissimilar to the feeling of being lost in writing.” Besides recounting the messy process of creating yarn, Orenstein offers a colorful history of fiber production, the invention and evolution of spinning mechanisms, and even the prevalence of spinning in folk and fairy tales. She was surprised by her discoveries “about how clothing has shaped civilization, class, culture, power,” noting many instances when knitters (those pussy hats!) practiced “craftivism.” She also discovered the environmental impact of clothing production. As she notes, dyeing and finishing are “responsible for a fifth of the world’s industrial water pollution,” and discarded “fast clothing” piles up in landfills. Although at times it felt overwhelming “to parse every purchase, to ensure it supports sustainability and fair working conditions,” the author emerged from her project with a commitment to thinking more consciously about consumption—as well as with new insight into her fears, grief, and apprehension about the future.
A charming memoir of a quietly transformative year.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-308172-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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