A captivating tour of a lawyer’s encounters with creative genius.
An attorney reflects on a life working with immensely talented clients, the result of his magnetic attraction to inventive artists, in this memoir.
Curto was “born into the Golden Age of lawyerdom”—New York City in 1936—and enjoyed a career at least sparked by a measure of luck. While attending the New York Law School, the dean, Daniel Gutman, asked the author if he was related to a friend with the same name. Curto was not, but as a consequence of that brief exchange, he was then known to the dean, a relationship that ultimately led to his first legal position at Buhler, King & Buhler. The firm represented a “roster of star clients,” among them Jane Pauley and Garry Trudeau. That early professional experience turned out to be decisively influential, and his career became driven by a profound attraction to creatively fertile types. That allurement is the thematic spine of this memoir: “All these stories have a common thread, which was unseen to me as I was living through them. The thread is the unique individual whose goals captured my imagination and compelled me to support them. It was these people who have defined my legal life.” The author’s remembrance is structured around these wide-ranging encounters and features anecdotes about an eclectic group, including author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, film star Linda Lovelace, football player Freeman McNeil, and journalist Harrison Salisbury.
Curto writes with admirable lucidity—even potentially forbidding questions about legal technicalities are rendered fully accessible to the layperson. While the author’s vivid stories focus on celebrities, it is not their fame per se that sets them apart for Curto—this remembrance is not the expression of infatuation with stardom. In fact, the author poignantly limns an homage to creativity in all its forms: “Simply stated, I was attracted to these special people whom I saw as ‘creators,’ fashioning their own worlds. I have always thought that artists and entrepreneurs, like God, create, while explorers and scientists discover. The difference to me is profound.” Furthermore, some of the tales the author relates intersect with grand world history. In one of the most memorable of his anecdotes, Curto “played a pivotal role in a high-risk, international scheme that secretly conveyed the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the West,” specifically two literary classics, The First Circleand The Gulag Archipelago. Despite Curto’s obvious success and talent, this is an astonishingly unpretentious work, free of any self-congratulation. The author’s abiding aim is to highlight the virtues and accomplishments of others—his principal role is as a kind of witness to greatness. This is a breezy read that delivers more entertainment than edification, and doesn’t challenge readers deeply. In addition, many of the luminaries discussed in the book will be obscure to a younger readership. Almost no one born after, say, 1980, will be familiar with singer/songwriter Harry Chapin. But since the memoir is about the author’s serendipitous encounters with innovative genius, that familiarity hardly matters; the point isn’t to gawk at the glitterati, but rather to appreciate the nebulous wellsprings of creative fecundity. Curto’s reminiscence is a delightful experience, easy though intriguing, a rare literary combination.
A captivating tour of a lawyer’s encounters with creative genius.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781631959059
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Onward Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
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