Offers rare personal insight into a riveting place and time despite some lethargic pacing problems.
Mounsey’s memoir recounts her stint as a medic in Iraq’s oil fields.
In 1995, the author was a 34-year-old single mother of four who had just graduated from college as a registered nurse. After escaping a toxic marriage, she moved her family to Phoenix, Arizona, where she began working in hospitals. “My nursing career was much like the Johnny Cash tune, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere, Man,’” Mounsey writes, “medical, surgical, telemetry, emergency, ICU, cath lab, pre-op, post-op, I’ve done everything, man.” As someone who had always been fascinated by wilderness medicine, Mounsey began to look for a drastic career change. After a few false starts, in 2011, she received a phone call from the company FrontierMedex offering her a position in Iraq. Soon, Mounsey boarded a 777 British Airways plane headed to the U.K. for her intensive HET (Hostile Environment Training), and despite being someone who had rarely ever made an international phone call, she would find herself landing at the Basra airport, passing customs, and strapping herself into a Kevlar flak jacket and helmet to head to her new post at ROO, the Rumaila Operating Organization, manager of Iraq’s largest oil field. There, Mounsey found herself responsible for an intimidating list of tasks while servicing the people working the field. Single-handedly crewing an armored ambulance each day and managing injuries or illnesses outside the main camp, Mounsey performed all these tasks against a backdrop of soaring desert temperatures and land mines left over from various wars.
While the working environment in Iraq was dangerous, Mounsey loved her job and the extensive travel that her ample time off afforded, such as trips to Mt. Everest, the Taj Mahal, Rome, and several cities throughout the Middle East. Her memoir digs into the daily realities of caring for people in such a harsh environment, the friends she makes (including Tane, the timid ambulance driver who became her workplace crush), and the extreme office politics, involving a manipulative manager named Lilith. With so many amazing experiences under her belt, Mounsey has a wealth of material to draw from, and her most engaging passages come from the moments in which she admits her own naïveté. She digs into local customs and the struggles of Iraqi women through her deep connection with her friend Anwar and offers some fascinating insights into the lives of expats as she drinks contraband wine with a fellow American in Kuwait. Her humble style flips the most incredible remembrance into something relatable and even sweet, like her first ride in an armored car: “Of course, anyone with military experience would not think anything of this, but I felt like the big cheese.” The level of detail Mounsey provides paints a full picture of life in the oil fields, but her narrative voice can become tedious. Too much energy is dedicated to the minutiae of different travel itineraries—lengthy passages about plane delays and minor visa snafus distract from more fascinating observations about the inner workings of a fraught international oil field or potential kidnapping risks at checkpoints. An abrupt ending promises a second book about what happened next, but also leaves much to be desired, especially in terms of the author’s emotional arc.
Offers rare personal insight into a riveting place and time despite some lethargic pacing problems.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781958729151
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2024
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
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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