Down to earth, heartfelt, and illuminated by a lifelong commitment to principles.
Vignettes from a life of activism, writing, speaking, and service, mined for insights and advice.
Steinem’s second memoir, following My Life on the Road (2015), is a mostly grateful, sometimes rueful accounting of the people and places that have shaped her 92 years on earth. A chapter titled “Bad Things I’m Glad Happened to Me” includes a moving section called “A Small Person Looking After a Bigger Person,” about her experience as the caretaker of her mentally ill mother after her parents divorced. For a while, the two lived in a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo, Ohio, where Gloria was bitten by a rat in her sleep. Despite these vicissitudes, she finds humor where she can, explaining that, according to her upbringing, you weren’t allowed to be unhappy unless a disaster had befallen you. But in her undergrad years at Smith College, “I discovered that a mood was a prerogative one could exercise from time to time and no one would think worse of you. I was delighted. I immediately began to have moods.” She traces the experiences that shaped her political consciousness, including a racially mixed dance club her father owned on a lake in southern Michigan, years spent in India on a fellowship after college, and obstacles she faced as a beginning journalist, public speaker, and organizer. A chapter on key influences includes interesting stories about James Baldwin, Wilma Mankiller, and Simone de Beauvoir, along with few characters she despises, including Andy Warhol and Hugh Hefner. She can get a little preachy with lines like “When we look at history this way, we live a more fulfilled present” and “It’s fun to take the stones of our lives and make stone soup that nourishes all of us.” But sometimes, the moral of the story does resound: “There is nothing more basic or radical than telling the truth and listening to other people do so.” This beloved principle led to decades of hosting “talking circles” from those who led to the founding of Ms. magazine in 1972 to a 2025 gathering to talk about artificial intelligence. Numerous photos and artifacts add charm and interest.
Down to earth, heartfelt, and illuminated by a lifelong commitment to principles.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2026
ISBN: 9780593978177
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
IN THE NEWS
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 substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.
The Oscar-winning actor and producer opens up about filmmaking, sex, drugs, and escaping his father’s shadow.
Despite its casual, just-shooting-the-breeze title, Douglas’ memoir is detailed and precision-engineered to entertain; as a filmmaker who won his first Oscar as a producer (for 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), he knows a successful story needs clarity and conflict to work. The son of screen legend Kirk Douglas, he was well-acquainted with celebrity at an early age; witnessing his parents’ divorce, he spent much of his youth acting out. (He paid for college by selling weed by the suitcase-load.) After years of stalls and failures, he broke through on TV with the ’70s cop show The Streets of San Francisco. But small-screen work (along with his nepo-baby status) made breaking into big-screen roles harder until 1984’s Romancing the Stone made him a star and 1987’s Wall Street earned him a second Oscar. Douglas is candid about his industry struggles—like endless budget fights and betraying his father, who was promised the lead in Cuckoo’s Nest—and his reputation as a lothario. (Though married, he had an on-set affair with Kathleen Turner during Stone.) He’s also open about his alcohol and cocaine abuse, leading to a rehab stint, echoed in his son Cameron’s own struggles with addiction and recovery. He’s comfortable discussing controversies—the LGBTQ+ community’s protests of 1992’s Basic Instinct, his proto-MAGA character in 1993’s Falling Down—and plainly keeps an enemies list. But this story arc leaves him triumphant, with a loving wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his family, his health (after a cancer scare), and a late-career Emmy for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra (2013).
A substantive, dishy, entertaining glimpse into Hollywood royalty.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781538782224
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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