An engaging but uneven account of a controversial Founding Father.
A lawyer defends the tarnished legacy of Thomas Jefferson in this biography.
Jefferson, this book argues, “has been subjected to pernicious stereotypes that grossly impede our complete understanding of the man,” as contemporary historians have held a “relentless focus on his views on slavery” and his “alleged affair with Sally Hemings.” Using the lens of Jefferson’s grandchildren Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge to explore the leader’s final years, Hyland paints the Founding Father and former president as a man of “towering character” with “massive powers of self-control.” Such hagiographic depictions of Jefferson, which run contrary to the near consensus of academic historians, abound in this volume despite occasional, offhand lines that assert “Jefferson was no saint.” An attorney and a contributor to the Federalist Society, Hyland serves on the board of directors of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, an organization founded to promote the leader’s legacy and combat the findings of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. The foundation’s DNA work concluded that Jefferson was most likely the father of Hemings’ children. A skilled litigator, the author is an adept storyteller and defends Jefferson’s legacy with a confident narrative. This, combined with ample photographs and reproductions of paintings, makes for an engrossing read. But to historians well versed in the Jefferson family saga, the book’s research isn’t likely to win many converts. While primary sources related to Jefferson’s grandchildren are used, most footnotes disappointingly rely heavily on secondary sources and rehash familiar stories of the statesman’s life. And while lamenting the influence of “critical race theory” in tainting recent scholarship on Jefferson, the volume displays an obsession with the man’s “abject courage, love, sacrifice, and wisdom” that creates its own politically motivated narrative. The work fails to convincingly address the paradox of a freedom-loving owner of enslaved people other than to note how Jefferson’s views on the topic were “evolving” in his later years. From this skewed perspective, the book’s analysis of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, highlights his moral quandaries about slavery yet ignores the work’s explicitly racist passages that discuss in detail his belief in Black intellectual and emotional inferiority.
An engaging but uneven account of a controversial Founding Father.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68515-571-1
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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