An eloquently enlightening family history.
A British-based Singaporean journalist probes family silences surrounding her beautiful and mysterious great-aunt.
Lim began researching her Chinese great-grandfather soon after she arrived in England in 1992 with her British husband. Over time, the one family member who came to intrigue her most was her great-grandfather’s youngest daughter, Fanny, who chose not to marry and “built a bridge between the orthodox and the modern for the later generations of women in her family.” A single family photograph dated from 1935 marked the beginning of Lim’s journey into her family’s past. She combed the archives of the School of Oriental and Asian Studies and the British Library for clues about the great-grandfather who had left a crisis-ridden, unstable China to work as an interpreter for British colonial administrators in Singapore. Piecing together family stories, Lim describes how her liberal-minded great-grandfather allowed Fanny—who rejected all Chinese anti-feminist traditions—to take a public oath of celibacy.” Her "sworn spinster" status allowed her the freedom to learn English, study at Hong Kong University, and pursue a career as a schoolteacher. It also gave her the means to support her elder sister when she left her husband for taking a concubine. Still, Chinese tradition still held power over Fanny. When the Japanese army marched into Singapore in 1942, she killed herself in what her family believed was an act of self-protection from the dishonor of rape. Yet Lim believed Fanny’s suicide could not be so simply explained. The Japanese arrested and executed thousands of Chinese men during their brief reign of terror, among them Fanny’s brother. Her death was meant as a symbolic expression of anguish for a family member she loved. Rich in the little-discussed history of Singaporean Chinese, this multigenerational memoir offers a timeless tale of the quest for identity, wholeness, and truth.
An eloquently enlightening family history.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63936-268-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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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