Credit Greenberg for assembling a deluge of fascinating statistics. Bench him for hyperextended prose.
A sportscaster decides which players own the numbers from one to 100.
Along with his longtime producer, Hembekides, ESPN stalwart Greenberg loves a good debate. He’s going to get them from readers after selecting not so much the 100 most accomplished players in sports history, but those whose exploits secured “ownership” of each number—e.g., Babe Ruth with No. 3 or Tom Brady with No. 12. In most cases, it’s about the men and women who wore the numbers, but other digits are awarded to such luminaries as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams, representing their total victories, winning streaks, or years they dominated. It's a fun, entertaining, and totally subjective book, but Greenberg’s hyperbole and smug certitude get tiresome, as they do on his radio show. Sports fans will concur with many of his selections but disagree vehemently with others. “Wayne Gretzky is the greatest athlete in the history of North American team sports,” he writes, and golf is “the greatest game ever invented.” Even for a book about superlatives, there is an eye-rolling excess of “greatest ever,” “best who ever lived,” and similar effusions. Greenberg allows his enthusiasms to run away with him, with a breathless writing style that grates after a few pages. Sometimes he contradicts himself: “Tom Brady is the greatest football player that has ever lived,” he writes; 50 pages later, he anoints Jim Brown as “the best football player that ever lived.” Greenberg tries to hedge, contrasting “best” versus “greatest,” but this sort of splitting of hairs doesn’t cut it. One of the author’s favorite phrases is, “there is no doubt.” Readers, however, will find plenty to doubt in these pages, and the author fails to provide enough contextual information to back up his choices.
Credit Greenberg for assembling a deluge of fascinating statistics. Bench him for hyperextended prose.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9781368073561
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion Avenue
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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