A poignant and lyrical read that will ring true with sailors and interest landlubbers.
A memoir of life with a peripatetic father who had an unquenchable passion for the sea.
Stirling first boarded a sailboat in the early 1970s, when she was just a toddler. The small custom-built sailing yacht Cattle Creek, which her father constructed in Peng Chau, Hong Kong, would become the most consistent home that Stirling would know for more than 20 years. Her earliest memories are of being at sea with her parents; she describes her young-child wonderment, lying on her mother’s lap on deck, looking at the moon: “She comes bright in the black night sky like a surprise, illuminating her path to us. She instigates the plankton in our wake and they glow like fairy dust.” By the time she was 4, she’d sailed from Peng Chau to Manila, on to Singapore, across the Indian Ocean to the Seychelles, and then flown with her mother to Europe, winding up on the Isle of Wight, where she briefly attended kindergarten. In between voyages, the American family was based in Colorado, where the author’s father built houses and acquired real estate holdings. When she was 10, her parents divorced, but by then she’d absorbed her father’s love of sailing as well as his restlessness. Over the next years, she joined him, his friends, and his girlfriends on journeys traversing the Caribbean and the South Pacific. This is a memoir of coming of age on the high seas, and in it, the author offers a collection of vivid portraits of places and relationships, including her first serious romance. Readers will almost feel the misty saltwater coming over the bow, the discomfort of the primitive in-cabin accommodations, and the raw frustrations of a young girl dealing with a father who was “so happy when…leaving port” but sullen, agitated, and often intoxicated onshore. Although the accounts of Stirling’s early memories are fragmented, recollections from later years, culled from her journals, are viscerally and eloquently detailed descriptions of the beauty, loneliness, and rowdiness of the extraordinary world of her formative years.
A poignant and lyrical read that will ring true with sailors and interest landlubbers.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-647423-23-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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