A moving memoir that favors poetry over people.
McDermott shares his journey from childhood adversity to the U.S. Army to investment banking in this memoir.
Born in 1978 to a single mother, the author grew up in Orlando with a “void” born of his biological father’s absence. McDermott found a positive role model in his stepfather, Rick Hardwicke, but their relationship became strained when the author reached high school. Following a divorce from Rick, McDermott’s mother experienced delusions, was committed to a mental hospital, and lost their home in foreclosure. Despite these challenges, the author was accepted into West Point and began his military career. In his personal life, McDermott met his biological father and forged a relationship with his half-siblings. A relationship with a high school acquaintance named Lucy turned romantic in 2001; the couple married in 2002 and welcomed a baby boy. In 2003, the author was deployed to Kuwait for Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon his return later that year, McDermott began experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and left the Army in 2005. In 2006, he started an MBA program at the University of Virginia. Under pressure to provide for his growing family, McDermott became an investment banker, but he was laid off in the financial collapse of 2008, resulting in a huge blow to his confidence. The author accepted a lower-paying job in Washington, D.C., and his wife and children moved to Florida to be closer to family. After being assaulted during a home invasion in 2011, McDermott hit rock bottom and sought counseling to heal from his traumatic past. In 2013, he and Lucy divorced, only to reconcile during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a full-circle conclusion, McDermott’s son Brandon was accepted into the West Point class of 2025.
The author tells a compelling and unflinchingly personal story about his winding road toward wholeness and healing in this moving memoir. He boldly owns up to uncomfortable truths: “Investment banking was not a path I chose for my family but a path I came to lust for with selfish ambition.” Insightful revelations like “I’m doing the very thing I loathed most about my father. It is the trauma of my life I’m passing on to my children” will be relatable to trauma survivors. Evocative descriptions drop readers into McDermott’s surroundings (“the Kuwaiti desert stretched out around us, an endless expanse of sand that blurred the boundary between earth and sky”). The narrative is well-balanced and diversified; McDermott intersperses poems, journal entries, letters, and counseling sessions into the narrative. However, the poems—paired with explanations—feel like unnecessary additions to an already fleshed-out narrative. Stanzas like “I’ve been missing you all the while. I’ve been missing the sight of / deep blue eyes. // I’ve been missing your smile. I’ve been missing you every night— / my starlight” demonstrate passion but minimal technique. The book’s second part, with its extended military scenes and technical language (“While we were engaging an enemy dismount with 7.62 mm coax, one of the links in the feed shoot broke off”) may lose civilian readers. Lucy, as written, comes off as a one-dimensional woman; readers are informed she is beautiful, but little is shared about her inner world, hopes, or desires. The nonlinear timeline also makes it difficult to follow the author’s professional rise and personal downfall.
A moving memoir that favors poetry over people.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247082
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
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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