A spirited remembrance from a nature-loving guide.
In this debut memoir, TV documentary producer Sakas spins yarns from her years paddling through one of America’s great wetlands.
The great Okefenokee Swamp covers 700 square miles along the Georgia-Florida border. Its tannin-rich waters are known for their high acidity and tea-black color, and the slow, warm waterways are a favorite destination for kayakers year-round. For decades, Sakas has led tourists on multiday excursions into the vast wetlands, navigating its majestic cypress groves and pine islands. This book offers a bit of that experience to those who’ve never booked a tour with her: “My intent is to help the reader experience the exquisite greatness and small magical wonders this incredible wilderness holds,” she writes in her preface. For instance, she tells of a visitor in 1983 who, at 6 feet, 9 inches, was too tall for his tent; as he slept, his uncovered head attracted a bobcat, who cuddled against it and fell asleep, leading to a very rude awakening. She also tells of the time that she and her companions accidentally incurred the wrath of a territorial mother alligator, who pursued them over multiple days. Many stories are about the unusual ways people interact in nature, as in a late-night heart-to-heart among four older women in 2007, during which one admitted to eating her cremated husband’s ashes. Sakas writes with energy and enthusiasm throughout, as when she describes the breakneck escape from the aforementioned alligator: “I am positive we could have stroked a Harvard rowboat team. We paddled intently, in unison. We had only one goal. Get past momma. I looked back in time to see momma make one last mighty lunge in renewed effort and even greater determination than before.” The text is accompanied by dozens of full-color photographs of the swamp and various people mentioned in the stories. The anecdotal book has the feel of a good travel blog, although readers with a particular interest in the Okefenokee are likely to enjoy it most.
A spirited remembrance from a nature-loving guide.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1735619217
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Maudlin Pond Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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