An enthralling family memoir and an unromantic commentary on manhood.
A writer reckons with the legacy of his charismatic, philandering father.
Lou Junod was built like “a cross between Jack LaLanne and Victor Mature,” with a deep, dark tan and hair as “black as shoe polish,” writes his son Tom, an award-winning magazine journalist. “From Fred Astaire, he learned how to dress; from Cary Grant, how to talk; and from Clark Cable, how to treat women.” And the women? “[T]hey can’t keep their eyes off…your father,” he’d boast. A traveling handbag salesman in the 1960s and ’70s, Lou had a wife and three kids on Long Island but seemed to lead other lives, with other women, on the road in Miami, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In the shadow of this overbearing patriarch, the author observes, the family has “no history, no family tree…no stories except the stories my father tells, about himself.” Still, the son—intimidated, often to the point of tears—is determined to investigate the mysteries of this man, beginning at age 16 with a locked Samsonite briefcase that he manages to open. (What he finds there unsettles him deeply.) The investigation becomes a vocation after Lou’s memorial service in 2006, when a former employee in his showroom—a striking Black woman named Muntu Law—ascends the pulpit and proclaims, “Can we all…just agree…that this…was a man…” The resulting book, written with both panache and feeling, circles complex truths about Lou and the family that made him the man he was. Along the way, readers get to know the author’s mother, Fran, as unnerved by Lou as their son is, and encounter a host of other characters: Lou’s formidable sisters; the longtime mistress who met an untimely end; unsuspecting strangers who may turn out to be family; even Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor—“Really, Dad?”
An enthralling family memoir and an unromantic commentary on manhood.Pub Date: March 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780375400391
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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