Those seeking depictions of graphic sex and the ins and outs of prostitution will dig Hof’s salacious memoir. Others should...
In this sex-drenched memoir, the proprietor of the Las Vegas brothel the Moonlite BunnyRanch spills his guts about the joys of running a stable of women.
Readers may think that such an individual would be completely unsavory, but as it turns out, he's only partly unsavory. Hof comes across less as a dirty old man—he's even a bit of a romantic, as witnessed by his lifelong pursuit of love—and more as a businessman, albeit one who is acutely aware of how and why his business works. (He was a regular BunnyRanch customer before he took it over in 1993.) Throughout the book, the author brings other voices to the mix to share their experiences of Hof and the BunnyRanch, including celebrity madam Heidi Fleiss, Chicago-based radio personality Mancow, a goodly number of the bunnies, and, most notably, porn legend Ron Jeremy, who infuses the proceedings with his trademark good-natured sleaze. The most emblematic portion of the book is an eight-page section in which Hof teaches Sunny Lane on how to be the finest whore she can be, going into graphic detail about how to get into a john's head and, most importantly, his wallet over and over again. Hof takes himself more seriously than one would expect, considering that one of his nicknames is "the P.T. Barnum of Booty," but that's probably why the BunnyRanch has thrived for the last two-plus decades under his watch—and it shows no sign of slowing down. All readers are aware that sex sells, and Hof unquestionably knows how to sell sex. Whether or not that's a good thing is for readers to decide.
Those seeking depictions of graphic sex and the ins and outs of prostitution will dig Hof’s salacious memoir. Others should steer clear.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-27-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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