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MY AILING CHAMPION

An often absorbing, if occasionally polemic, immigration remembrance and defense of the American dream.

In this memoir, a Greek immigrant to the United States who’s also a linguistic scholar shares his version of the American dream.

The book opens in 1994in a restaurant in the Cook Islands, where Koubourlis listened to an anticolonial anarchist at a nearby table pontificating on the history of American exploitation. As an immigrant who viewed the United States as a “savior,” the author stood up to publicly debate the stranger on American virtues. This introductory anecdote sets the tone of the memoir, which centers on how the U.S. opened up educational, professional, and other opportunities for the author. The book’s first half centers on his life in his home country of Greece. Born during his own nation’s civil war, Koubourlis had a childhood that included homemade bomb shelters and other wartime horrors that he later featured in his short story collection, Sometimes Cruel (2023). The current book mostly focuses on his desire, as a young adult, for an education: “I was locked into a family and community conspiracy,” he writes, describing himself as suffocated by the “war-traumatized mediocrity” of his family’s psyche. Hungry for education, the author expressed dismay that his mother banned books from their home and encouraged him to find a trade or enlist in the military. To escape the limited opportunities of his motherland, Koubourlis immigrated to America in 1959 to attend California State College in Sacramento; the author recalls his awe at first seeing the Statue of Liberty and skyscrapers as his ship approached New York City. Over the course of the next two decades, his life centered on what he calls an “educational marathon.” Koubourlis would earn a doctorate from the University of Washington’s Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures Department and later become a tenured professor.

Although the author notes the highlights of his career, which included the publication of multiple scholarly books and his service as a foreign-exchange professor in the Soviet Union, much of his book is dedicated to his admiration of the nation he now calls home. Never one to back down from a philosophical debate, he notes his public squabbles with Ivy League Marxists, whom he describes as “ideological sleepers on the alert for any opportunity to replay their canned message.” Although he’s critical of American politicians driven by “crisis-driven policy,” Koubourlis emphasizes his belief that his adopted country’s “core ideals align with a better world.” Those on the left of the political spectrum may disagree with his defense of American exceptionalism, as well as some of his policy positions, such as his argument that immigration authorities should prioritize “the cream of the crop.” But the book’s narrative offers an inspirational read when it’s focused on the author’s personal triumphs. The author employs an accessible, engaging style that’s distinct from that of his peer-reviewed, academic writings. The text is accompanied by full-color maps, photographs, and other images, although some of the book’s AI-generated artwork detracts from the narrative.

An often absorbing, if occasionally polemic, immigration remembrance and defense of the American dream.

Pub Date: June 1, 2024

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Axios Eclectics

Review Posted Online: April 26, 2024

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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TANQUERAY

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

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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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MARK TWAIN

Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.

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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

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