Wistful and meditative, sparked by lovely prose.
A memoir about walking in Thoreau’s path.
Shattuck, artist and director of Maine’s Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency program, channels the writings of Thoreau in this reflective foray into the oft-traveled world of walking. After reading Thoreau’s Cape Cod and in a fit of anguished nightmares and restlessness, Shattuck decided that now was the time to set off. Beginning at Massachusetts’ Nauset dunes, he searched for the small shack in Wellfeet where the iconic writer stayed. “Walking through the pines around Wellfleet’s seven outer ponds,” he writes, “my footfalls silenced by carpets of ochre and shed needles, I quickly got lost.” Two days later, he reached Provincetown, where he experienced “exactly what I wanted—to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod.” Dealing with medications for Lyme disease, Shattuck hiked other Thoreau destinations, including Mount Katahdin, Wachusett Mountain, and Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, where he took a dip. Throughout, Shattuck interweaves Thoreau’s writings with his own observations, reflecting on the geographical changes caused by climate change and urban sprawl as well as the stars that Thoreau described as “our fellow-travelers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny.” The narrative sputters when it shifts to Shattuck’s time in Rhode Island, where family had lived, his relationship with his wife, Jenny, and an unfortunate accident years ago with a boat’s gunwale that resulted in the loss of the top part of his middle finger. Reliving Thoreau’s hiking and canoeing adventures in northern Maine’s Allagash Wilderness Waterway gets Shattuck back into his enthusiastic, poetic stride, describing the same black flies that had also accosted Thoreau, listening to bird song, and observing a double rainbow. Accompanied by Jenny, he concludes with a return visit to Provincetown, wanting the “revelation that came at the end of my first Cape walk: that following Henry led to hidden, unexpected goodness.” The author’s black-and-white illustrations dot the narrative.
Wistful and meditative, sparked by lovely prose.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-953534-04-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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