An engaging, touching, and history-filled tribute.
Wilson’s biography of Catherine (Kate) Beecher, the 19th-century author and advocate for women’s education and health, focuses on the little-told love story that changed her life.
Kate Beecher, eldest daughter of Rev. Lyman Beecher, a prominent Evangelical preacher in Litchfield, Connecticut, made her official society debut in October of 1815. A lively and popular 15-year-old, she attended the Litchfield Female Academy (LFA), a finishing school for proper young ladies. Now, it was time for her to begin searching for a husband. But Kate was a poet, musician, and romantic; she was determined to find a man who would appreciate her sense of independence and her intelligence (“her parents’ marital expectations had to be reconciled with the hopes of her romantic heart”). Unfortunately, when Kate was 16, her mother died of consumption, and Kate withdrew from LFA to help tend to her seven younger siblings, putting a temporary halt to her efforts at courting. In 1819, after her father remarried, Kate traveled to Boston, where family members living there hoped to make a suitable match for her with Albert Hobart, a successful merchant. But Albert did not quite capture Kate’s heart. In the Spring of 1821, 20-year-old Kate met 26-year-old Alexander Fisher, a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Yale University and a celebrated scientific author. Their stars appeared to be in alignment; a formal courtship quickly commenced, only to end with Alexander’s tragic death at sea less than a year later. After years of research spent going through historical records and family letters, Wilson posits his theory that the loss of Alexander was pivotal to Kate’s subsequent career as an educator. The author builds intriguingly contrasting portrayals of his two protagonists: Kate is extroverted with a hair-trigger temper, while Alexander is introverted and swings between euphoria and deep depression. Detailing the era’s social norms and religious practices, Wilson constructs a vibrant portrait of the period and convincingly conjures up moments illustrating the couple’s growing affection for one another; a family descendant recalls that 50 years after Alexander’s death, Kate retrieved Alexander’s stored letters, having never looked at them again since the tragedy. She sat by the fire, rereading each of them slowly and then burning them.
An engaging, touching, and history-filled tribute.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2024
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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