Abandonment and loss are at the heart of this deeply cerebral, literary memoir.
A professor of Middle Eastern studies recounts his experiences during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990.
El-Ariss, author of Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals, was born two years before war erupted in Beirut in 1975, blowing apart his young world, which resumed afterward under horrific conditions. In this poignant, thought-provoking memoir, thematic chapters often resonate with the multiple meanings of Arabic words—e.g., “khabissa (‘the jumbled one,’ a Jell-O-like dessert with walnuts and pomegranate) [or] mfattqa (‘the craved one’ or ‘the ripped one’—a sweet pudding made with turmeric and tahini).” The latter, he writes, perfectly “encapsulates the pain and wounds from the catastrophes of the past.” Beirut becomes the city “dedicated to the memory of Job,” encompassing his unholy suffering. The author vividly chronicles how the city was deeply divided as the bombs fell and people fled. His father, a prominent gynecologist, vowed to remain, despite the violence and disruptions at the author’s school. El-Ariss writes memorably about his suppression of fear, which caused psychological damage—though he did not realize the extent until years later, as a young man in New York City visiting a Freudian psychiatrist. Studying philosophy at the American University of Beirut when the war ceased in 1990, he finally found his “motley crew of questioning misfits and outrageous rebels.” The author’s prose is beautifully evocative and only occasionally overwrought: “The bullet of war lives in my head, inhabits my entrails.” El-Arris ends the narrative just after 9/11. “New York was my city, and those who attacked it were going to answer to me,” he writes. “Didn’t they realize what I had to endure to arrive here? Have they no idea what I experienced as I was escaping those skies that never stopped raining death and displacement?”
Abandonment and loss are at the heart of this deeply cerebral, literary memoir.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781635424461
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
