An excellent exploration of the life of an admirable pioneer who deserves to be far better known.
A stirring life of a civil rights crusader.
An outstanding student from a working-class background, Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005) entered law school at Columbia in 1944, a time when, she recalled, the campus “resembled a ghost town.” Brown-Nagin—a constitutional law professor, dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Bancroft Prize–winning author—ably shows how Motley emerged as not just one of the first Black women to practice law, but a key assistant to Thurgood Marshall. Early on, her work led a newspaper reporter to call her “the Civil Rights Queen,” and he had a point. Motley was a critically important member of the team that successfully litigated Brown v. Board of Education, to the delight of one Southern judge who “could not suppress his laughter” at the lies of school officials. In the second act of her life in public service, Motley became the first woman to be elected the borough president of Manhattan and the first Black woman to be elected to the New York Senate. Finally, she became a federal judge who had a gift, as the author beautifully and convincingly demonstrates, for interpreting precedents in novel ways. For example, in deciding a case in which women reporters had been banned from the New York Yankees locker room, she weighed the presumed privacy rights of ballplayers through the lens of Roe v. Wade, with its promise of anonymity, but “rejected it as a legitimate reason for banning female journalists from the locker room entirely,” citing a previous case won by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In some cases, Motley was so far ahead of the societal curve that she courted controversy, as when she ruled that gay Catholics could protest in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The following year, notes Brown-Nagin, the Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of consensual gay sex, but Motley anticipated the sea change that would soon follow.
An excellent exploration of the life of an admirable pioneer who deserves to be far better known.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-524-74718-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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