A Rhode Island congressman charts an American democracy falling apart at the seams.
“In retrospect one might say that the most surprising thing about January 6, 2021, was that we were surprised by it,” writes Cicilline. With a solid political pedigree, including two terms as the first openly gay mayor of Providence, Cicilline is a student of changing cultural mores, battle lines in the culture wars, and long-standing prejudices and stereotypes. In the last instance, he recalls his Italian American father, a noted lawyer, with a rhetorical question: “This guy Cicilline wants us to believe he hated the corruption in Rhode Island, but his own father represented the top mob guy. How can he square these two things?” As the author writes, his father also pushed for civil rights, public school integration, anti-poverty programs, and more. Cicilline has spent significant energy warring against legislators at home who have pushed an anti–LGBTQ+ platform, “a very un–Rhode Island thing to do,” given founder Roger Williams’ devotion to “liberty of conscience.” Conscience is in short supply among Republicans on the Hill, Cicilline argues persuasively. Even though Mitch McConnell despised Donald Trump and said, after Jan. 6, that he would vote to impeach Trump (Cicilline was a House impeachment manager), McConnell instead held up the proceedings. If Trump, who “actively abused his office while neglecting his duties,” is Cicilline’s chief bête noire, there’s a whole host of enablers who draw his scorn. They actively threaten democracy even as Democrats tread water, “making detailed proposals for addressing complex problems and failing to sell them in the way Republicans sell their program of tax cuts and obstruction.” To counter this weakness, Cicilline proposes an aggressive response to combat Republican attacks on voting rights, abolish the filibuster, and expand pro-democracy initiatives.
A robust political memoir that affords the White nationalist element in Congress no quarter.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-2259-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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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 28, 2022
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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