An edifying, well-written narrative that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism.
Samaha, a reporter and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News, offers an expansive view of Filipino history and the experiences of Filipinx immigrants, who, with their American-born descendants, comprise the fourth-largest diaspora in the U.S. For his maternal grandparents, Manuel and Rizalina Concepcion, America was the land of opportunity. Although the family was prosperous (maids, private schools), beginning in 1965, when the U.S. dropped its immigration quotas, various relatives began leaving, and others followed as economic and political conditions deteriorated under the military rule of Ferdinand Marcos. Samaha and his mother came in 1995; his Lebanese father stayed behind, and his parents divorced a few years later. Drawing on more than 100 interviews as well as oral histories, court cases, and immigration records, Samaha creates a vivid sense of the reality immigrants encountered in a country they believed would offer “dreams and stability.” Even with evidence of dysfunction and decline, they never lost their faith in American greatness. The author interweaves stories of family and friends with a wide-ranging history of exploitation, oppression, and violence that shaped Filipino society and culture as Spain, Japan, and the U.S. took over the islands. “The colonizers,” he writes, “trained us with single-minded rigor to devote ourselves to their well-being.” Even after the U.S. granted the Philippines independence in 1946, the CIA “kept a guiding hand on the country’s leaders,” including Marcos. Samaha's identity as Filipinx was in flux throughout his childhood and adulthood as he moved between the White world his mother venerated and his self-identification as “a kid who wanted to be Black.” He came to realize that Filipinx immigrants “weren’t merely new arrivals to a nation, but to a longstanding system of racial oppression, suspended somewhere between those who conquered the land by blood and those whose blood built the empire."
An edifying, well-written narrative that provides an intimate perspective on the legacy of colonialism.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08608-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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