The autobiography, much of which may be factual, of a dirty old man, illustrated with x-rated photos. You may want to wash...
The unsavory, wild adventures of the man who made his fortune delivering pornography to the American mass market, the former King of Smut, now destitute, dependent on lithium, Social Security and the kindness of strangers.
Back in the day, before the Internet made his special product available to everybody at the click of a mouse, Goldstein was a seminal figure in the industry. No dirty place was too far for his pulp magazine, Screw, to travel. Some called it liberal, countercultural, a trumpet for freedom, while others simply called it filth. Clearly, both were right. Screw embodied a special art form presenting schoolyard humor that featured naughty words, muddy photographs and explicit artwork, all as thoroughly offensive as intended. The periodical was first sold, Goldstein says, by blind newsstand operators. The publisher made millions. He wallowed in the unrelenting potty talk—he still does—and reveled in the nonstop sexual play, which he remembers fondly in his account of a unique life. Goldstein’s story is a chronicle of his appetites for expensive watches, sweet revenge, cigars, pastrami and, foremost, sex organs. It is populated by a lot of porn stars, scum-peddlers, lubricious whores, faithless wives and one disloyal son. (His own father was a “putz.”) Included are pop-culture figures like Walter Winchell, Larry Flynt and Linda Lovelace, friendly restaurateurs, slick lawyers, actor-murderers and made guys. Our hero got a rise out of the citizenry; he was jailed and, finally, forgotten and abandoned by old comrades in the sex business. Screw shut down in 2003 after 35 years and 1,800 issues. Now, Goldstein is a tired scalawag, a corpulent old lion, toothlessly gnawing old bones. Without his wealth or health, Goldstein retains his talent for lewdness.
The autobiography, much of which may be factual, of a dirty old man, illustrated with x-rated photos. You may want to wash your hands after handling this one.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-868-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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