Part memoir, part backyard gardening guide, and altogether charming.
Rotting organic matter inspires this collection of personal anecdotes, garden science, and historical digressions.
We meet the author behind a coffee shop in tony Westport, Connecticut, as he’s gleefully putting a garbage bag full of coffee grounds—still warm!—in his car. This brown gold is on its way to Smith’s compost pile, where its nitrogen will transform fall leaves into rich soil. His dumpster diving isn’t just a way to get free nutrients for his garden. By liberating these spent beans and reusing them, he’s keeping them out of an already overflowing landfill. He may also be keeping leaves out of a landfill; yard waste makes up a rather shocking amount of all that people throw away in the United States. Smith’s investment in his own patch of land extends to a concern for the environment generally, and his sense of alarm is woven throughout the text. But this diary of a gardener’s year is more than a call to action. Smith’s composting career began when he was an editor at a food magazine, and his cooking colleagues started giving him their kitchen scraps. The prose here is stylish but never showy. Smith’s sentences have the patient pacing of someone attuned to the seasons. Any observant and curious writer is likely to go off on tangents, and this writer certainly does. The author includes quotations from Wendell Berry and Henry David Thoreau, but he also shares Natalie Goldberg’s meditation on mental composting from Writing Down the Bones. Anyone claiming to be any kind of authority on compost would reveal themselves as a fraud without a chapter on worms, but not every author will mention that Cleopatra declared earthworms sacred or that the landmass that we call North America was denuded of earthworms during the last ice age, only returning with European settlers. Even when he offers glimpses of his personal life beyond the garden, Smith’s sense of time is connected to the state of his compost.
Part memoir, part backyard gardening guide, and altogether charming.Pub Date: July 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781960865069
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Christmas Lake Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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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