Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.
The self-indulgent navel-gazing of a high-priced call girl.
A few years ago, a notorious London working girl started publishing her journal on the Internet. Through her blog, the anonymous author gained a following in the U.K., and now her work is being brought to the U.S. Each of the 12 chapters (titled in French, for no apparent reason) represents a month in her life. Many pages are devoted to specific customer requests; one can learn a great deal about anal sex here. Rather than being titillating, the author exposes the sex trade for what it is—a commodity. This isn’t a feminist diatribe; the author goes through her assignments with no obvious feelings of degradation. Her apparent motivation is to earn enough cash to support her expensive lingerie habit. The author does have an affinity for rough sex in her personal life, which is—as expected—in shambles. Men come and go in a series of one-night stands and short-lived relationships. She collects old boyfriends like trophies and parades them out in public when she needs to feel desirable. Don’t expect any deep revelations or a grand climax. Other than the sexy bits, the author’s reflections are mundane and include inane observations and shopping lists. The author waxes poetic about a trip to Spain and mentions many of her everyday jaunts about London. In both instances, she painstakingly attempts to capture her settings, but to what purpose is unclear. Is she trying to impress the reader with her intellect? If so, perhaps she should seek out alternatives to her diet of pub-crawling and bed-hopping.
Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57725-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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