A poignant history of a small town, as seen through the lens of youth sports.
Pelissero blends memoir and microhistory in this story of an Upper Midwest high school basketball team.
The author opens with a vignette set in his hometown of Bessemer, Michigan, shortly after the local high school team, nicknamed the Bessemer Speedboys, won the 1947 Upper Peninsula of Michigan Class B Basketball Championship. The teenage champions “had scaled the tallest mountain,” he writes, ominously adding that “with their heads so high above the clouds, they could not foresee the storm brewing below.” Indeed, by the ’60s, A.D. Johnston High School would see multiple losing seasons, including a 42-game losing streak that spanned over 1,000 days. Pelissero recalls his childhood dream of wearing the Speedboys’ blue and gold uniform and the centrality of high school basketball to the town’s identity. The volume blends general recollections of the town with his own specific experiences growing up there in the ’60s—from playing pickup games at his friend Denny Kontny’s house, whose extra-wide driveway was nicknamed “Kontny’s Kourt,” to buying candy at Tip Top Café’s penny machines. He introduces readers to multiple basketball coaches, who took on larger-than-life personas, while commenting on daily life in a small Midwestern town. Catholicism, for instance, played a major role in Bessemer life; locals took particular pride in the election of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic president, and priests once sprinkled holy water to bless a busload of basketball players: “The boys, Catholic or not, made the sign of the cross as the holy water brushed by their windows,” the author observes. By the late ’60s, the war in Vietnam became a major concern of the author and his peers.
Throughout, the author effectively connects the fortunes of Speedboys basketball to Bessemer’s wider history. As the economic boom of the ’40s and ’50s gave way to a Rust Belt malaise by the late ’60s, so, too, had the town’s basketball team fallen from its past glory. When the team finally won a game in 1966 after a record losing streak, Bessemer coach Carl Gregas emphasized that the win “sends a strong message to everyone who loves this school and loves this town, that in the end, teamwork will win the day.” In an inspirational story of athletic grit, A.D. Johnston High School would go on to win four conference championships in the ’70s and head to the state tournament for the first time since 1948. Pelissero, a multisport athlete and a 1973 Johnston graduate, blends his memories with impressive research that includes extensive use of local newspaper journalism and his own interviews with more than 50 people. The book effectively balances its nostalgia for small-town American life with a realistic assessment of how economic downturns and overseas conflicts affected average citizens. Pelissero, a gifted storyteller, relates the tale of Bessemer with reconstructed dialogue and occasionally fictionalized scenes that compress multiple stories into a single vignette. The work’s accessible prose is accompanied by an array of photographs, including yearbook stills and family snapshots.
A poignant history of a small town, as seen through the lens of youth sports.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9798218642020
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Sellar Street Boys Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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