An intriguing religious perspective, told through skillful prose and smartly crafted arguments.
A writer and artist explores her coming-of-age crisis of faith through a blend of memoir and fiction.
Luidens’ book begins with “Fact,” a section detailing her rather charming childhood in Altamont, New York. As the second of three children, she grew up adoring her father, who worked as the minister of the Reformed Church next door. Early on, she soothed her worries through imagined, nighttime conversations with God, but as she got older, playground questions about hell caused her to question the Bible’s authenticity. In the book’s second section, “Fiction,” Luidens recounts her freshman year at a Christian college, where her intellectual curiosity about biblical origins got her accused of “heresy” and set her on a path to abandoning her faith altogether: “No more mysterious, iridescent Trinity blowing like long curtains through my theology,” she writes. The third section, “Truth,” follows Luidens into a more pronounced existential crisis during her art-focused study abroad in France. As she wandered Paris, she imagined conversations with the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, Socrates, John Locke, and David Hume, at last finding herself considering a life without God. Luidens’ prose describing her early years is ethereal and affecting—especially the moving descriptions of her father’s love, juxtaposed against her burgeoning skills for sharp analysis and introspection. She skillfully transforms her dreamy prayer-time conversations with God into the hard, academic debates that later occupied her adult mind. Luidens is also graceful in her portrayal of her frustration with traditionalist views without ever mocking her Christian peers. Exchanges comparing the Bible’s account of the great flood to historical fact are humorous but never mean-spirited. The author’s notes on the differences between the book’s sections and how to interpret them as either fact or fiction feel superfluous and unnecessary, though; what Luidens has put to the page will clearly come across to readers as her owntruth—no disclaimer necessary.
An intriguing religious perspective, told through skillful prose and smartly crafted arguments.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781963077018
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Left Field Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 17, 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
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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