A superb travelogue, brimming with color, adventure, and pungent insights.
A man wanders the East searching for experience, enlightenment, and good hash in this luminous memoir.
Glicksman, an American English professor and jewelry importer before his death in 2021, recaps three decades of periodic sojourns in the Middle and Far East starting in 1971. The author usually traveled on his own, in threadbare circumstances. His destinations included Turkey, where he encountered “hashish of a legendary quality” that made “the air…thick and wavy,” Afghanistan, where he endured “merciless heat” during a rooftop bus trip with the help of “a gigantic spliff” of “fine Afghan hashish,” and Katmandu, which boasted “government hashish shops…where you ordered as much as you wanted.” But his heart belonged to India, less for the hash than for the spiritual profundity of its Hindu and Buddhist lifeways. Glicksman took in funeral cremations in the holy city of Varanasi; watched as a snake charmer got several cobras—and an awestruck crowd—swaying in unison to his hypnotic tune; was menaced by a monkey that imperiously ransacked his room for food; did relief work in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where he was appalled by the death and devastation from a cyclone; engaged in searching philosophical discussions at ashrams; and “inhaled deeply of air that seemed to come from a much older time, a time, perhaps, when men shared the earth with gods” at the temple of Hadimba Devi. An epic 1985 trek to Tibet’s capital of Lhasa ended with a brief, poignant love affair with a Chinese teacher. Later chapters on his travels in the 1990s sound an autumnal note as the author registers the creeping commercialization in once unspoiled Indian towns engulfed by the tourist trade and mourns the waning of his youthful tolerance of grungy authenticity.
Glicksman’s is a beguiling, sometimes-prickly, always compelling voice; he’s raptly attuned to and respectful of his surroundings, but always uncomfortably aware of his status as an outsider looking in, entranced by Eastern religious culture but too questioning and too set in his Jewish heritage to wholly embrace it. (He’s also politically outspoken, on everything from his opposition to the Vietnam War to his loathing of nuclear power.) Glicksman’s ravishing prose is full of fresh, evocative takes on landscapes—“how light and airy the [Taj Mahal] looked….like a butterfly resting on a leaf, readying to take flight.” There is a spirituality evident in the writing, one that comes not from theology but from a painstaking, open-hearted observation of reality. (“[H]er hands and face laid waste by leprosy, this woman made pariah by the superstition of man, returned my stare with one of the most beautiful smiles I had ever seen. She had splendid white teeth. From a ravaged freak, she transformed before my astonished gaze into a princess, an angel, and Mother India gave me yet another nudge into uncharted waters.”) This memoir is an entrancing saga of a man expanding his soul by resolutely abandoning his comfort zone.
A superb travelogue, brimming with color, adventure, and pungent insights.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798218614485
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Earth Door Sky Door
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.
The late heavy metal legend considers his mortality in this posthumous memoir.
“I ain’t ready to go anywhere,” writes Osbourne in the opening pages of his new memoir. “It’s good being alive. I like it. I want to be here with my family.” Given the context—Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, two weeks after the publisher announced the news of this book—it’s undeniably sad. But the rest of the text sees the Black Sabbath singer confronting the health struggles of his last years with dark humor and something approaching grace. The memoir begins in 2018; he wrote an earlier one, I Am Ozzy, in 2010. He tells of a staph infection he suffered that proved to be the start of a long, painful battle with various illnesses—soon after, he contracted a flu, which morphed into pneumonia. A spinal injury caused by a fall followed, causing him to undergo a series of surgeries and leaving him struggling with intense pain. And then there was his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, the treatment of which was complicated by his longtime struggle with alcohol and drug addiction. Osbourne peppers the chronicle of his final years with anecdotes from his past, growing up in Birmingham, England, and playing with—and then being fired from—Black Sabbath, and some of his most well-known antics (yes, he does address biting the heads off of a dove and a bat). He writes candidly and regretfully about the time he viciously attacked his wife, Sharon—the book is in many ways a love letter to her and his children. The memoir showcases Osbourne’s wit and charm; it’s rambling and disorganized, but so was he. It functions as both a farewell and a confession, and fans will likely find much to admire in this account. “Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes. “And at some point, I’m gonna have to let him in.”
A charming and often poignant valediction from rock ’n’ roll’s Prince of Darkness.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781538775417
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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