An often engaging story of a hiking enthusiast regaining her autonomy after a divorce.
The challenge of trekking through mountainous terrain helps a woman tackle the treacherous peaks and valleys of her life in this travel memoir.
Just before the start of the new millennium, Magoon, an environmental scientist at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, reached the summit of Mount Washington, one of 48 mountains with elevations of at least 4,000 feet in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Fifteen years would pass before she would summit the remaining 47. During her 27-year marriage, the author says, she’d been subject to fits of anger from her controlling husband; she became afraid to ask him for anything and quick to blame herself when things went wrong. However, she summoned the courage to visit her job’s crisis center, began seeing a therapist, and soon divorced her husband. Finally free to make her own decisions, she vowed to join the “Four Thousand Footer Club” and scale the aforementioned mountain peaks. She tells of learning survival techniques like “STOP” (sit, take stock, observe, and plan)to assess challenging situations and take appropriate actions. During therapy and life-coaching sessions, she also learned helpful adages such as “action is rewarded.” She applied her newfound skills while navigating day-to-day life as well as mountain topography. After she climbed mountains 17 and 18, however, her life was turned upside down when she learned disturbing news about her ex-husband. In an introduction, Magoon’s life coach, Emily Clement, notes that “Linda’s transformation didn’t happen one mountain at a time…her healing has been a long, slow journey that happened one small step at a time,” and this effectively captures why her story is likely to resonate with readers: It clearly speaks to the unpredictability of healing through her accounts of her struggles to overcome grief, betrayal, shame, and self-doubt. She also includes the hiking challenges she faced; however, the mountains she scales lack notable distinguishing features, which has the effect of making the details of individual climbs feel tedious. Nonetheless, Linda’s dry wit, candor, and perseverance will win many readers over.
An often engaging story of a hiking enthusiast regaining her autonomy after a divorce.Pub Date: June 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798987817407
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Kearsarge Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2023
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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