A poetic memoir about a biracial author’s international life.
A Pakistani Dutch novelist tells both her own life story and those of her parents and grandparents through the lens of cities where her family has lived.
Khan begins this memoir in essays in 2001 in Ithaca, New York, soon after the tragedy of 9/11. At her elementary school, a few fellow students called her family “terrorists” and threatened them with violence. This terrifying incident sets the stage for a series of essays describing seminal moments in the author’s life, including her Dutch mother’s and her Pakistani father’s deaths in Vienna. In one essay, which begins in Denver, where she met her husband, Naeem, years after their shared childhood in Pakistan, Khan recounts the aftermath of Naeem’s undiagnosed heart attack in Syracuse, New York, marveling at the fact that he lived and cringing that she attended a Ravi Shankar concert on the night when he may have died. In another, the author remembers her grandparents’ home at Five Queens Road in Lahore and recounts how a Partition-era land dispute could not mar her happy childhood. After discussing her lived experiences, Khan investigates her past, examining her maternal grandparents’ dysfunctional marriage and writing about the love letters her parents sent each other while living on separate continents and debating the possibility of an interracial marriage. “The letters,” she writes, “are written on blue aerogrammes and onion skin paper, and sometimes white linen letter pads, and on all surfaces, they stretch with longing and constrict with details….The letters cement their relationship across continents, perhaps the least of their divides.” At its best, the narrative is poignant, lyrical, and insightful, drawing readers into the details of the author’s physical and emotional landscapes. Though the text occasionally feels like a laundry list of historical facts, the collection is heartfelt and deftly constructed, clearly displaying the author’s rhetorical talents.
A poetic memoir about a biracial author’s international life.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5848-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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