A gripping and grounded celebration of a pioneering athlete.
Gossom and Heys offer a biography of James Owens (1951-2016), a trailblazing college football player for Auburn University.
As the authors make clear in their debut collaboration, the history of Southeastern Conference (SEC) football, which was established in 1932, was one in which Black athletes faced constant discrimination. When Owens, the first Black athlete to play for Auburn University’s Tigers, took the field at Cliff Hare Stadium alongside his fellow varsity teammates on September 18, 1970, it was a sign of imminent change: “To see Owens enter the stadium…was a signal moment, hinting at possible equality of the races, visible through the meritocracy of sport.” The authors have consulted a wide variety of primary sources to tell Owens’ story from his youth in Fairfield, Alabama, to his later years of poor health; the highlight and the clear focus of the book, however, is his time at Auburn. The account quotes Owens’ former teammates extensively, such as the placekicker who said, “It was amazing to watch James do what he did week in and week out, the punishment he took.” The reality of his experience also slowly dawned on bystanders and observers of the time. As one young sportswriter grimly wondered in the early ’70s, if Black players in the SEC had “said, ‘I don’t have to put up with this’ and left, how much would integration have been delayed?” The book includes dozens of black-and-white photos capturing various periods of the publicity-shy Owens’ life, as well as a generous section of explanatory endnotes.
Gossom and Heys do a highly effective job of marshaling their sources into an involving narrative. Their focus is, of course, Owens, but they mindfully fill in the picture of the wider world he encountered when he left Fairfield High and dared to dream of playing football instead of getting a dead-end job in the local steel mill. As the first cracks in segregation began to appear, they note, every Black player felt pressure that none of their white teammates would ever feel. As Southern Methodist University coach Hayden Fry told the family of another pioneering Black athlete at the time, he “could not fail.” The authors are repeatedly outspoken about their subject’s courage and his historical importance: “Owens was a hero…from the day he arrived at Auburn,” they write. They also effectively, even jarringly, get across the raw nature of the game, and the physical ordeals endured by Owens and all the other players. Likewise, they skillfully express the disappointments of a career in sports: “Athletes live game to game, always waiting for their ‘next turn at bat,’” they write. “And when they don’t get it, they can lose themselves in the void.” That void often seemed to threaten Owens, whose depression deepened at times when other figures, such as University of Alabama head coach Paul William “Bear” Bryant, gained fame in the history of 1970s sports integration. As the authors wistfully note, “America seems to favor myth over reality.”
A gripping and grounded celebration of a pioneering athlete.Pub Date: July 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781985902701
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.
Remembering “Hershy.”
Three hundred and twenty-eight days. That’s how long Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held in captivity—tortured and starved by his captors in underground tunnels—before he was executed. He was 23 years old. In this unvarnished and heartrending account, Goldberg-Polin’s mother, Rachel, writes of the unending torment that she and her husband, Jon, endured after learning that their son had been kidnapped by Hamas terrorists during the attacks of October 7, 2023. Like so many other young people on that day, Hersh was attending a music festival in Israel—a celebration of love and unity. As Goldberg-Polin writes, her son was “the only American citizen kidnapped alive on October 7th who did not return alive.” In direct, plainspoken language that steers clear of politics, the author, a Jewish educator, recounts “being in a daze of the most indescribably sickening horror and fear, like nothing I had ever felt in my life. I remember my heart racing and feeling like I was in a permanent state of someone scaring me.” In addition to “shovel[ing] out my pain in the form of words,” she shares reminiscences of her son, as well as details that only a parent could notice. “His eyes were cookies,” she says of her “Hershy.” “I couldn’t find the pupils within the dark chocolate-brown irises.…He had a raspy voice, even when he was a baby.” And: “I thought he was hilarious; his sarcasm and humor were similar to mine.” Hersh and his sisters, Leebie and Orly, adapted well to life in Israel after the family moved from Richmond, Virginia. (Hersh was born in the Bay Area.) After being discharged from his service in the Israeli army as a combat medic, he was planning to journey around the world—a longtime dream of his. “So many people have come to love you, Hersh,” Jon Polin writes in the book’s afterword. And with one simple word that has the power to touch any heart, he signs off: “Dada.”
Suffering unfathomable anguish, a mother memorializes her murdered son with great tenderness.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217198009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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