A stirring account of the dubious battle waged against Jim Crow by an unsung pioneer.
This biography salutes a basketball phenomenon who integrated a bastion of racism.
Heys recaps the life of Henry Harris, the first Black athlete to play for a Deep South college in the Southeastern Conference when he started for the Auburn University Tigers basketball team in 1968. Hobbled by a knee injury that ended his dreams of NBA stardom, he killed himself in 1974. The writer—a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of The Winecoff Fire (1993)—makes Harris a potent symbol of the successes and shortcomings of the civil rights movement. Born to an impoverished family in harshly segregated Greene County, Alabama, Harris benefited from the quickening pace of desegregation in the ’60s, which prodded the previously all-White athletics programs at Auburn and the University of Alabama to offer him scholarships. But when he began playing at Auburn, Heys notes, Harris ran a gantlet of racial insults and threats at many of his games, struggled to find integrated accommodations on the road, and had to hide a relationship with a White girlfriend. More insidiously, even as his talent and fortitude made him a fan favorite, he felt a persistent loneliness and alienation on the overwhelmingly White campus—White teammates avoided rooming with him—and a sense of being disposable when his value to the Tigers waned. The author sets Harris’ experiences against a sweeping account of Jim Crow in Southern sports and the arduous struggles of Black athletes, who braved physical danger—one football player died when his White teammates suddenly piled up on him in a scrimmage—and ostracization. Heys’ narrative deftly untangles the complex evolution of racial politics in sports in the ’60s, while his lucid, sensitive prose lays bare the psychological pressures Harris faced and waxes lyrical about his quiet heroism. (“Harris was the tip of a spear heaved by his forebears…all the field hands who persevered in the South for decades, waiting for a chance to prove themselves…as if they had ushered him out of the cotton fields, a basketball in hand, to meet this appointed hour.”) The result is a gripping and poignant saga of an unfinished revolution.
A stirring account of the dubious battle waged against Jim Crow by an unsung pioneer.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-56578-1
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Black Belt Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
