by Jason G. Pike ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 10, 2023
An engrossing, warts-and-all view of Army life, simultaneously irreverent and inspiring.
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A United States Army officer battles a learning disability, office politics, and his own worst instincts in Pike’s memoir.
The author, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, begins his narrative with his boyhood in Georgia and South Carolina, describing his struggle with a learning disability that made it difficult for him to read, write, or absorb complex instructions. At loose ends, he joined the Army National Guard in 1982 at the age of 17 and endured a brutal stint of basic training under a sadistic drill sergeant, an ordeal that instilled in him the conviction that “nothing is impossible if you can get enough training.” Pike applied that dictum to simple matters like making his bed and fieldstripping his M16, then to more complex tasks like completing college and earning two postgraduate degrees. He continued on to a military career as an Army entomologist and medical officer responsible for sanitation, hygiene, and combating insect-borne illnesses, eventually commanding units in South Korea and Afghanistan. But he continued to struggle with setbacks, including a DUI arrest (which could have ended his career if not for some adroit bureaucratic maneuvering) and a feud with colleagues that culminated in false charges of pedophilia and spying. As he unspools this history, the author also pays colorful tribute to his hardscrabble family—particularly his father, a sales executive who escaped dire poverty but retained a roguish streak that he inculcated in his son through watermelon-stealing lessons and a rough-and-ready attitude (“He liked a man who played football or baseball, because that meant he was a team player, and if making that touchdown required a fist to the balls or a handful of sand in the eyes, he had no problem with that”).
Pike delivers a canny, wised-up, decidedly unheroic portrait of military service, told from the perspective of an insider who does his duty as well as he can while understanding that the key to success is learning to navigate power plays and manipulate ponderous Army bureaucracy (he once managed to get an application for a transfer processed by the expedient of attaching a $1 bill to the paperwork to catch a clerk’s eye). In his telling, he was simultaneously a shrewd operator and a compulsive, sometimes self-defeating maverick who was forever getting chewed out, both by superiors and low-ranking subordinates. (“Sir! You are an officer! Why would you steal an enlisted person’s lunch?”). The narrative is full of hang-dog comedy, from a tumble into a cesspool to an Airborne School hazing ritual (“In my case, I had to stand naked in the doorway of an aircraft…holding on to the sides that had been rigged with an electrical current”), all rendered in pungent prose with vivid, absurdist detail rooted in evocative, sharply observed psychology and vivid characterizations (“His was a microworld, a fiefdom slowly built over many years, almost like an academic version of Apocalypse Now,” he writes of one entomologist rival; “He had a way of ingratiating and smiling that did nothing to hide his fury”). Pike perseveres with good humor and a persistent belief that service in the military was worth the travails and indignities he suffered along the way.
An engrossing, warts-and-all view of Army life, simultaneously irreverent and inspiring.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798371034502
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by Ron Chernow ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2025
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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