Mather combines a personal story with an era-spanning scope, turning esoteric information into a colorful, engaging account.
A surprising sojourn into an unknown field and a paean to the mysterious sentinels of the planet’s history.
Most people, when they hear a volcano start to rumble, run away as fast as possible. Not Mather, whose instinct is to run toward it with a pack of scientific equipment and an obsessively inquisitive mind. Now a professor of Earth sciences at Oxford, she first became interested in volcanoes during a childhood encounter with Mount Vesuvius. Since then, she has climbed crumbling escarpments, hacked through jungles, and slogged across ice fields to study them. In this fascinating text, the author tracks through the history of volcanology as it unraveled the different types of volcanoes and eruptions. The rocks ejected during an explosion or left behind after a magma slide provided a wealth of information, once scientists worked out how to read them. Careful analysis of fumes also offered important clues. Slowly, the picture of how and why magma broke through a mountain crest was pieced together across decades of meticulous study. These days, most of the potentially dangerous volcanoes are monitored for warning signs, but these are cantankerous and unpredictable beasts. Mather notes that they are a constant source of surprises, even for people who have studied them for decades. They have been shaping and reshaping the terrain for millennia and will continue to do so for millennia to come. Mather finds them inspiring and humbling, and her love of the subject—of “the majesty of Etna, the beauty of Villarrica, or the understated intrigue of Masaya”—shines brightly on each page. Readers who are interested in popular science will find that this book is hard to put down, a remarkable journey with an entertaining guide.
Mather combines a personal story with an era-spanning scope, turning esoteric information into a colorful, engaging account.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781335080851
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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