A sensitive portrait of one family’s struggles with illness, even if the spotlight isn’t always where it should be.
A newspaper editor describes his experience as husband to a minister and breast cancer patient.
Eville, the editor of the Vineyard Gazette on Martha’s Vineyard and a New Jersey native who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen (“essential to life”), spent time in the banking industry in New York City and then as a development executive in the film business. What he wanted, however, was to be a writer. While in New York, he reunited with high school classmate Cathlin, who was attending seminary at Judson Church. They fell in love, and the author admits it was an odd pairing for a man who “tended to keep my head down to avoid anything I feared might be theologically contagious.” By the early 2000s, they were married and living on the Vineyard. Cathlin became the minister of the First Congregational Church in West Tisbury, and Eville was a stay-at-home father (“the best job in the world”) to son Hardy and his little sister, Pickle. Eville eventually rose to become the Gazette’s editor, but life had a cruel twist in store: Cathlin’s diagnosis of breast cancer. In short chapters, the author chronicles the ordeal, which included chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and months of radiation before she was cancer-free. For a book about a woman’s breast cancer, it’s odd that much of the focus is on the husband rather than the wife. Most of the story is about his relationship with his children, his past, and the effect his wife’s cancer had on him. Readers learn comparatively little about Cathlin. What’s here, however, is agreeably written and contains many charming scenes, from Eville’s introducing Pickle to Springsteen by singing from Seeger Sessionswhile he toilet trained her to the children’s sweet reactions to their mother’s illness—as when Hardy drew with his crayons “a battle scene with numerous bad-guy cells and a ray gun destroying them; oddly enough, they all had mustaches.”
A sensitive portrait of one family’s struggles with illness, even if the spotlight isn’t always where it should be.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781567927382
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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