A story and character that’s already been fictionalized—with a good deal more compassion—in the TV show Californication.
Reality-show producer Wieder plays bachelor and details the ensuing spiral of shame.
His memoir opens with the author tugging and pulling at himself in what are later revealed to be a series of PE—as he truncates Penis Enhancement—exercises. In February 2005 (the Year of the Rooster on the Chinese calendar), the author left his wife to seek the life of a swinging single. “Los Angeles is of course a town acrawl with sexy young women,” he writes, “even the least desperate of whom I felt confident I could lure home to my tastefully decorated future bachelor pad.” Wieder encountered his first stumbling block when it became clear that his best friend was heading to the altar, and thus would be unavailable as his dedicated wingman. “[A]s off-the-leash and totally committed as I was to getting sloppy laid,” he writes, “I knew how potent our combined mack would be.” Yet he persevered, setting up three dates with three different women over three consecutive nights for his second full weekend of “bachelorhood.” Though Wieder claims to have exhibited genius-level smarts in childhood aptitude testing and occasionally drops references to things like poststructuralist texts, the majority of the narrative is dedicated to celebrating his outright decadence and the “many women [he] hoped and planned to fuck.” Just when he thought he was “so fucking set,” he had an existential crisis, spurred by the Internet release of a sex tape featuring Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. After years of producing shows that humiliated participants for ratings, Wieder—upon hearing Durst’s penis described as small and then comparing sizes—felt an emotion he “couldn’t identify at first” (turned out to be shame). The author then proceeds to describe his pathologically addictive behavior regarding PE.
A story and character that’s already been fictionalized—with a good deal more compassion—in the TV show Californication.Pub Date: July 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-58216-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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