by Andy Halmay ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 22, 2015
A mildly provocative, gloriously eccentric autobiography told through the aging eyes of a man who unapologetically adores...
An affable octogenarian reflects on the spicier snippets of his sex life.
“I amaze myself for being able to recall minute details of events of decades ago,” writes the 88-year-old author in this unconventional collection of appealing, inoffensive vignettes on life and sex. The son of a Hungarian soldier from Transylvania who fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Halmay (Ghost Town, 2013, etc.) was raised in the company of comely maids, each contributing to his carnal education and the loss of his virginity. From his youth in Toronto as a randy teenager, the author writes of being helplessly enamored by women and of becoming fascinated by their beauty and “lack of logic.” A lover of humorous females, he admits that his ideal mate would be actress Lisa Kudrow, whom he describes as “physically attractive but who is intrinsically funny and I find that devastating.” He writes floridly of a particularly zesty, early relationship at 19 with a voluptuous seductress named “Kiki,” then recounts torrid near-miss encounters stifled by office-cleaning women, steamy nights of drunken fumbling, a mother and daughter harboring very fluid views of sex, and an amorous yet disastrously irresponsible affair with a married woman. The longest (and least sensual) recollection in this memoir is a meandering memory encapsulating the dissolution of his 30-year marriage and an unusual friendship with an outspoken divorcée. Though his tale is uneven in theme and tone, Halmay emerges as a palpably passionate raconteur, showing an endless fascination with human nature and reliably interjecting a surplus of side banter into the erotic encounters that tickled much of his youth. The author’s infectious charm and nonchalant sense of humor shine most when he sticks to the absurdities of sex, even as his honest appraisals of both gay and straight marriage, sexual compulsion, and organized religion offer refreshing respites. Consistently frank, Halmay concludes his potent history with rather uneventful homosexual experiences and a poignant story of a friend who died too soon. Suffused with sage wisdom and quirks galore, Halmay implores readers to simply yield to life’s ebb and flow because “taking seriously the insanity of life tends to destroy us bit by bit.”
A mildly provocative, gloriously eccentric autobiography told through the aging eyes of a man who unapologetically adores the charms and wonders of women.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Veni Vici Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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