An admirable debut memoir featuring both a compelling narrator and a captivating story.
An illuminating coming-of-age memoir set in communist Hungary.
Born to a Jewish mother and Catholic father in 1940, Zsuzsa feels beloved and pampered. By late 1944, the family huddles in a tiny coal cellar with neighbors and listens to the bombs overhead as Nazis invade Budapest. They survive, only to face another type of prison: life under the Stalin regime and, later, the Russian occupation. As she moves through her childhood and teenage years, the precocious Zsuzsa offers cleareyed observations about her relationship with her parents (particularly her mother), friendships, schoolwork, theater and the discovery of boys, along with the struggles to find basics like food, clothing and shelter. Wild rumors fly amid the unexplained disappearances of teachers, family and friends, while arbitrary new government rules lead to nonstop pressure. The contrast of the ordinary and extraordinary creates a fascinating tension. Instead of normal summer camp in the woods, Zsuzsa attends Pioneer Camp at a crumbling mansion where she’s forced into night-guard duty. Instead of a full day of instruction, school hours include singing Red Army songs and marching and standing in formation. Vivid sensory details capture each experience, whether eating a juicy orange for the first time in years or listening to the clattering printing press where her journalist father works. Periodic short sentences and paragraphs cut to the painful truth: “School starts. Fourth grade. A completely new teacher appears.” The 100-plus short sections, organized chronologically, feel cohesive and well-paced, particularly after the opening pages, which provide the background of Zsuzsa’s parents. With its authentic voice and keen observations from a youthful narrator, the story evokes The Diary of Anne Frank. Secondary characters are briefly but vividly introduced and easy to differentiate. The particularly riveting last section offers the delightful paradox of wanting to read faster to reach the conclusion but slower to prolong the enjoyment.
An admirable debut memoir featuring both a compelling narrator and a captivating story.Pub Date: April 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468563566
Page Count: 400
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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