by Joan Steinau Lester ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2021
A frank love story set amid the ideals of the 1960s.
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Lester describes a radical marriage and its aftermath in this personal memoir.
The author met Julius Lester in the summer of 1962 at a summer camp in the Catskills, where they were both working as counselors. The Connecticut-raised, activism-minded Joan had been taking a break from college to work for a bit. Julie, as Lester liked to be known, was fresh out of college in Nashville and had headed to New York City to become a writer. Joan was white, Julie Black. Despite their inflexible personalities, they bonded over their mutual love of literature and their intense attraction to one another. “Maybe we really were the intellectual soul mates we believed we were, and some sixth sense let me know it,” reflects Lester. “Was I as forbidden to him, my access to a white world equally beguiling? He gravitated to me as much as I to him, as if we were two magnets being pulled toward each other.” They wed later that year, at a time when interracial marriage was rare and, in some states, illegal. The marriage lasted eight years before ending in divorce—eight years filled with activism, frustration, and clashing ambitions set against the tumultuous backdrop of America in the 1960s. The author writes with candor about the complex dynamics of their relationship, which shifted over time, due in part to Julie’s growing fame as a writer: “Julie, I only realized later, was essentially a conservative man whose artistic bent drew him, for a time, into bohemian environments that felt like home to me,” writes Lester. “The historical moment of the early ’60s made it appear that we shared progressive values, but as the decade wore on, it became clear we did not.” The book continues past the divorce, detailing the author’s subsequent relationships, her embrace of her bisexuality, and the long process of figuring out how to live for herself. With its novelistic detail and earnest but imperfect characters, this memoir reveals more than most about what makes activists tick.
A frank love story set amid the ideals of the 1960s.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 9780299331009
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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by Ezra Klein
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 Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton
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by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton
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