Essential, poignant, and insightful reading for anyone aiming to understand familial patterns of addiction.
A writer and former newspaper editor reflects on his family’s addiction issues following his son’s fatal drug overdose in this memoir.
The memoir opens in 2013, with author Magee witnessing his son William lying dead on his couch with a rolled up $20 bill still in his hand. William, who’d spent time in drug rehab, was eager to go to law school but unable to shake his addiction. During their final meeting before his death, William encouraged his father to write a book about their family’s struggles to help other families. Magee writes of being raised in a family that had its share of secrets: His parents covered up his adoption with a fake birth certificate, and his adoptive father was a closeted gay man. Magee also describes his own problems with substance abuse that began in his teens. As a father, he identified similar patterns of addiction in his offspring; his other son, Hudson, got into a life-threatening accident prompted by substance abuse. The memoir closes with the author working on building the William Magee Institute for Student Wellbeing at the University of Mississippi for students with alcohol and drug problems. Magee’s prose is crisp and precise, showcasing an effortless descriptive style: “The first day of February, I peek through the blinds. It’s sunny out, and flakes swirl in the air, although the sky is all blue. Everything else is white, alien, sparkling.” Despite journalistic leanings toward brevity, his writing is never sterile; this passage, describing his bond with his son, is subtly laced with evocative imagery and complex emotion: “He wanted to look out for me. Because I’m fragile. His boy-man face grows wavery as I blink back tears.” The text can be brutal at times, but overall, this is a carefully nuanced work that explores the dark realties of substance abuse. Indeed, despite his tragic loss, Magee’s tone is frequently positive: “Our children’s struggles have changed us. We’re more aware of the suffering of others and more motivated to help them.”
Essential, poignant, and insightful reading for anyone aiming to understand familial patterns of addiction.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953295-68-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Matt Holt/BenBella
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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