An engaging yet sometimes tedious book, with twists, turns, and detours galore.
Investigative journey to uncover the truth behind a Hindu princess’s secret life in Paris during World War II.
In this elucidating but meandering text, Italian writer Sambuy introduces readers to “a labyrinth…of unusual characters,” spinning fanciful tales of collaboration, priceless jewels, and lost fortunes of the princes of the Raj. Weaving together biography and her personal narrative, the author recounts how viewing a striking 1924 photograph of the Rani of Mani, Amrit Kaur, in a Mumbai museum launched her yearslong quest to unearth the history behind it. The official story was that this highly educated only daughter of the maharajah of Kapurthala had sold her heirloom jewelry in Paris to raise money for the Jewish cause. She was caught by the Gestapo and imprisoned in a concentration camp; in ill health, she died not long after the end of the war. Sambuy chronicles her trip to Pune to meet Kaur’s now-aged daughter “Bubbles,” and other relatives, to learn about how Kaur left her two children in 1933 to tour the European continent, perhaps angry that her husband had taken another wife. Apparently, she did intend to return. However, Sambuy discovered—via an improbable lead: a San Diego burlesque dancer named Ginger who possessed Kaur’s crocodile leather briefcase full of mementos—that the princess met the American heiress Louise Hermesch and her mother in London and took off to travel with them to America. Throughout the text, the author takes us away from this fascinating primary narrative for a few too many digressions—e.g., sections about the “unbridled extravagance” of the Raj princes and the priceless pearl necklace that Kaur apparently sold to prominent jewelers in Paris in 1940. Sambuy’s intriguing history eventually leads back to her own mother-daughter trauma, revealed only in the final chapter.
An engaging yet sometimes tedious book, with twists, turns, and detours galore.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780374106010
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
