A survey that perceptively captures the lives of taxi drivers and their distinctive qualities.
A nonfiction book examines the challenges faced by taxi drivers in England.
HBO’s Taxicab Confessions used a hidden camera to get passengers to candidly discuss their drivers. Finnegan takes the opposite approach, using her listening skills to get taxi drivers to open up to her about their lives as they shuttle her around her home city of Milton Keynes, England, and elsewhere. “More than just the some-time knights of the roads—itself a precious role—taxi drivers are also, it might be argued, in some ways the philosophers of our times,” she writes in a lively and often insightful ethnographic study compiled from five years’ worth of informal interviews with drivers. The author conducted most of the interviews in Milton Keynes, a provincial city with “some hundreds of licensed drivers—too many some drivers say,” while finding “similar patterns” in London (home of the iconic black cab) and other British metropolises. As elsewhere, immigrants constitute the majority of the drivers, including one who “had been a nationally admired fine jewellery craftsman in Pakistan” and another who, when not driving, spends his time “either in his mansion in Islamabad or, during the summer season, in his country estate there.” Finnegan shows that taxi driving is a demanding profession. Drivers are expected not only to know any place, street, or road where someone may need to be taken—one professional in Milton Keynes “had, among other things, to keep up his expert knowledge of the changing locations of brothels”—but also “how to deal with passengers in various physical and emotional states.” Indeed, “individuals tend to open up in this liminal setting of even a short taxi ride,” asserts Finnegan, noting that drivers describe themselves as “the agony aunts of the streets.” The author could have spent more time showing the impact of Uber and other ride-hailing companies on the taxi business but succeeds admirably in portraying the drivers’ “human qualities outside of their taxi-industry selves.” As one driver tells Finnegan, “If I wake up feeling in a bad mood or everything has gone wrong, but then I do something to help a passenger, I feel good for the rest of the day.”
A survey that perceptively captures the lives of taxi drivers and their distinctive qualities.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781739893767
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Callender Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
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.
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