Vintage Ali: literate rabble-rousing mixed with entertaining sniping, smart aperçus, and endless provocations.
Novelist, filmmaker, and firebrand Ali delivers a second volume in his memoir series, following 2018’s Street Fighting Years.
“These memoirs are centered on politics of one sort or another.” That’s an understatement, to be sure. Ali, a stalwart socialist, has never been shy of courting controversy. That’s true of this blend of autobiographical notes and gathered journalism and essays: toward the end of the book, for instance, in an essay on the horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023, he writes, “I don’t agree politically with Hamas.…But I do not and will not criticize them in public for defending Gaza.” Of course, one could dispute that the definition of “defending Gaza” includes the slaughter of peaceful concertgoers, but then one might argue with Ali at many points and still wind up learning a few things. In this, Ali resembles Christopher Hitchens, though even Hitchens might have waited a few days postmortem before lighting into the late Queen Elizabeth II (“The mainstream press of Europe wasting so much paper on the Windsors would do well to remember that the late queen was…a staunch supporter of Brexit, as revealed by Murdoch’s rag the Sun.” Whether Hitchens would take a swing at Ali for revealing that Margaret Thatcher once “affectionately spanked him” is unknowable, but it’s modestly amusing to learn that Ali, now in his 80s, is game to slap someone who gainsays his version of the cause. The doctrinaire stuff can be tiring, as can his dissecting the smallest of disagreements on the part of his fellow Fourth Internationalists. Still, Ali has always kept interesting company—the comedian Peter Cook, the writer Claud Cockburn, the literary scholar Edward Said—and gone after interesting subjects, whether the fiction of Anthony Powell, domestic spying in Britain, or the dictatorial politics of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Vintage Ali: literate rabble-rousing mixed with entertaining sniping, smart aperçus, and endless provocations.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781804290903
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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