A tender, personality-centered biography of golden age Berlin.
In this debut work of history, Frenkel explores a great European city through the collected photographs of his grandmother.
Clara Prinz came of age in La Belle Époque, the Beautiful Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of peace during which the great cities of Europe buzzed with prosperity, innovation, and optimism for human society. Clara’s native Berlin was perhaps the grandest city of them all, the capital of an ascendant Kingdom of Prussia and a hub of modern ideas. Clara’s active life in the city and her memories of these times—documented in letters and postcards—captured Berlin at the height of its grandeur. “She preserved them in an album of autographed photographs,” writes the author, “featuring talented personalities who became the finest representatives of the era as they visited, lived and thrived in Berlin.” These luminaries include Mark Twain, Isadora Duncan, Richard Strauss, and Theodore Roosevelt. Using these postcards and photographs as his jumping-off point, Frenkel—the grandson of Clara, who came across her album during his genealogical research—tells the story of this lost epoch, which ended calamitously with the outbreak of the First World War. He vividly captures the story of old Berlin, a city that the Jewish Clara fled with her family in 1939 and which was almost completely destroyed by the bombs of World War II. The depth of the author’s research allows him to cover broad swaths of history while also re-creating specific scenes from Clara’s life with novelistic flair. Clara witnesses the great tenor Enrico Caruso singing to the students gathered outside his dressing room window: “To the astonishment of his faithful valet, Caruso raised his arms and began to sing the aria from the Friedrich von Flotow opera Martha. Suddenly, the crowd fell into silence to listen to the beautiful voice they had come to hear.” Re-creating the city through the eyes of a family that would one day have to flee from it adds an extra layer of poignancy to the work.
A tender, personality-centered biography of golden age Berlin.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2022
ISBN: 9781734363531
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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