Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.
The self-indulgent navel-gazing of a high-priced call girl.
A few years ago, a notorious London working girl started publishing her journal on the Internet. Through her blog, the anonymous author gained a following in the U.K., and now her work is being brought to the U.S. Each of the 12 chapters (titled in French, for no apparent reason) represents a month in her life. Many pages are devoted to specific customer requests; one can learn a great deal about anal sex here. Rather than being titillating, the author exposes the sex trade for what it is—a commodity. This isn’t a feminist diatribe; the author goes through her assignments with no obvious feelings of degradation. Her apparent motivation is to earn enough cash to support her expensive lingerie habit. The author does have an affinity for rough sex in her personal life, which is—as expected—in shambles. Men come and go in a series of one-night stands and short-lived relationships. She collects old boyfriends like trophies and parades them out in public when she needs to feel desirable. Don’t expect any deep revelations or a grand climax. Other than the sexy bits, the author’s reflections are mundane and include inane observations and shopping lists. The author waxes poetic about a trip to Spain and mentions many of her everyday jaunts about London. In both instances, she painstakingly attempts to capture her settings, but to what purpose is unclear. Is she trying to impress the reader with her intellect? If so, perhaps she should seek out alternatives to her diet of pub-crawling and bed-hopping.
Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57725-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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