The path of allyship unfolds, with some gems along the way.
Musings on the South Asian author’s marriage to a Black writer, popular culture, and more.
About two-thirds of the way into this meandering collection, Sharma writes about attending a writing workshop at a bookstore. “I don’t have anything to write about. All I have been doing is wedding things,” she worries. “How about writing about those wedding things?” suggests her fiance, Quincy. Unfortunately, the author’s storytelling urge never gets much more urgent than that. It’s not that she has nothing to say about their interracial relationship, which Sharma frames in the context of allyship, but there’s not much forward momentum in its unfolding. They watched Mississippi Masala, about a similar love; later, they became fans of The Walking Dead. Sharma braids her discussion of the death of a popular Asian character on the latter with a review of the facts in the 1982 hate-motivated murder of Vincent Chin. This examination connects to discussion of more recent hate crimes, including the shootings of Asians in Atlanta and George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. We take a slight detour into the author’s history with improv comedy and emerge to discuss the Lovings and their “almost decade-long fight for their interracial marriage.” Then, back to the 2011 wedding, then back to Floyd, and then a chapter titled “We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny That Kamala Harris Is Our Time Traveling Daughter.” This chapter is largely about the freezing and maintenance of Sharma’s eggs, leaping back and forth through a timeline stretching from 1958 to 2022. The author also includes her sharply funny 2019 essay, “Shithole Country Clubs,” which was inspired by her father’s membership at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, and she salts the text liberally with jokes and wisecracks. (Nina: “Is there anyone like a ‘rich activist’?” Quincy: “Batman.”)
The path of allyship unfolds, with some gems along the way.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593492826
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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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