A masterpiece of a sports biography and a must-read for baseball fans.
An award-winning journalist tells the story of a baseball player who exhibited relentless hustle on and off the field.
O’Brien, the author of Fly Girls and Outside Shot, delivers a gripping portrait of fellow Cincinnati native Pete Rose (b. 1941). The author paints a vivid portrait of the simultaneously glorious and reckless life of Major League Baseball’s hit king, whose raw strength and work ethic symbolized baseball and the American dream itself, yet who gambled his way permanently out of baseball and its Hall of Fame, leaving a wake of bitter disappointment as he sped through life with the same air of tenacious invincibility that marked his play. O’Brien’s meticulous style captures Rose’s unlikely journey to his hometown Reds and his often complex relationships with teammates and opponents alike. Rose won every conceivable honor that a position player can win, but his addictions to gambling, women, and expensive cars belied his all-American image. O’Brien’s construction of the book is brilliant, offering a thorough examination of Rose as a sort of baseball Janus: Rose took the mocking sobriquet given to him by Yankee royalty Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford as a badge of honor and never yielded on the field, but he conducted himself off the diamond as Charlie Hustle, a man who invited a rogues’ gallery of hangers-on, gamblers, and drug dealers to his inner circle and ultimately doomed his legacy. O’Brien’s work is so well researched and adheres to traditional journalistic standards in such a way that it is, by any objective measure, as fair as possible to all the principle figures, particularly Rose himself, whom the author interviewed several times. The text leaves little doubt that the definitive account of the life and times of Rose belongs to O’Brien.
A masterpiece of a sports biography and a must-read for baseball fans.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593317372
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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