A lively and engrossing look at the making of a series that extends the Batman legacy.
Miller’s authoritative oral history of Batman’s animated incarnations continues in this volume.
The author continues his history of Batman in animated form by focusing on the three seasons of Batman Beyond, the Warner Bros. series set roughly 50 years after Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures (subjects of earlier volumes in this series). Batman Beyond features an elderly Bruce Wayne who’s passed the mantle of Batman to a teenage high school student named Terry McGinnis, who uses a technologically advanced costume to fight crime in a future Gotham City. The ratings for Batman Beyond were very strong from its premiere in 1999. In these pages, Miller includes interviews and reminiscences from and about most of the key figures in the show’s production, from producers like Bruce Timm to writers including Alan Burnett (who says of the show, “the crux of the whole series is seeing how these two characters—these two buddies who are 60 years apart in age—bring out the best in each other as the relationship grows”) and Paul Dini to series composer Lolita Ritmanis (“Had Batman Beyond not come around, I don’t know if I’d be working as much as I am now,” she reflects on the practical aspects of the job. “It forced me to actually have to invest quite a bit of money in equipment and change my thinking as to how shows can be scored stylistically and production-wise”). All of this is as effusively presented as the material in the preceding installments, with the perfect balance of general praise for a groundbreaking show and more specific insights into the process of working on a TV series. As always, the volume includes plenty of color images from the show and photos of its makers, plus an invaluable breakdown of each individual episode. Fans of Batman Beyond now have the series bible they’ve long wanted.
A lively and engrossing look at the making of a series that extends the Batman legacy.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798887710976
Page Count: 638
Publisher: BearManor Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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