A punishing read, filled with righteous anger and fuzzy on details.
Veteran true-crime/entertainment scribe Schwarz (Hollywood Confidential: How the Studios Beat the Mob at Their Own Game, 2007, etc.) charts the lurid life and times of a stripper.
The burlesque star notorious for her association with Jack Ruby and mob boss Mickey Cohen was born Juanita Slusher to impoverished parents in a small Texas town. A precociously attractive child, she was regularly abused and molested by a string of neighbors and family members. (In a particularly horrific passage, Schwarz describes eight-year-old Juanita being put up as the jackpot in a pedophile poker game.) She ran away from home in her early teens, settling in Dallas. There she immediately fell prey to “the Capture,” a tradition in which, Schwarz informs us, young girls were kidnapped, systematically raped and forced into prostitution, catering to the hypocritical Dallas establishment. After suffering in this role for a period, Juanita somehow managed to carve out a career as “Candy Barr,” a burlesque dancer whose act was so transporting that she became the toast of Las Vegas and attracted Cohen’s attention. Schwarz clearly presents this sensational material, but the book is one-dimensional. The endless litany of kidnappings, murder attempts, conspiracies, drug arrests, prison and rape after rape is hard to stomach and, after a while, hard to completely believe. Readers may raise eyebrows over the author’s unquestioning acceptance of Barr’s muddled, often half-remembered saga; they surely will wonder about his characterization of her as a brilliant artist. Quoted at length, she comes across as a rough-edged survivor and a self-mythologizer. Schwarz has written a compelling, upsetting screed against society’s depraved exploitation of an innocent, but it lacks the rigor necessary for full-scale biography and social history.
A punishing read, filled with righteous anger and fuzzy on details.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59077-126-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Taylor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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