A stirring account of the dubious battle waged against Jim Crow by an unsung pioneer.
This biography salutes a basketball phenomenon who integrated a bastion of racism.
Heys recaps the life of Henry Harris, the first Black athlete to play for a Deep South college in the Southeastern Conference when he started for the Auburn University Tigers basketball team in 1968. Hobbled by a knee injury that ended his dreams of NBA stardom, he killed himself in 1974. The writer—a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of The Winecoff Fire (1993)—makes Harris a potent symbol of the successes and shortcomings of the civil rights movement. Born to an impoverished family in harshly segregated Greene County, Alabama, Harris benefited from the quickening pace of desegregation in the ’60s, which prodded the previously all-White athletics programs at Auburn and the University of Alabama to offer him scholarships. But when he began playing at Auburn, Heys notes, Harris ran a gantlet of racial insults and threats at many of his games, struggled to find integrated accommodations on the road, and had to hide a relationship with a White girlfriend. More insidiously, even as his talent and fortitude made him a fan favorite, he felt a persistent loneliness and alienation on the overwhelmingly White campus—White teammates avoided rooming with him—and a sense of being disposable when his value to the Tigers waned. The author sets Harris’ experiences against a sweeping account of Jim Crow in Southern sports and the arduous struggles of Black athletes, who braved physical danger—one football player died when his White teammates suddenly piled up on him in a scrimmage—and ostracization. Heys’ narrative deftly untangles the complex evolution of racial politics in sports in the ’60s, while his lucid, sensitive prose lays bare the psychological pressures Harris faced and waxes lyrical about his quiet heroism. (“Harris was the tip of a spear heaved by his forebears…all the field hands who persevered in the South for decades, waiting for a chance to prove themselves…as if they had ushered him out of the cotton fields, a basketball in hand, to meet this appointed hour.”) The result is a gripping and poignant saga of an unfinished revolution.
A stirring account of the dubious battle waged against Jim Crow by an unsung pioneer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-56578-1
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Black Belt Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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