A raw, searing self-portrait.
Revelatory, unapologetic life story of a San Francisco stripper and sex worker.
Crane, a university writing instructor and Los Angeles blogger, writes nostalgically of her solitary youth as an energetic, restless “chunky” girl growing up in Northern California. Her father, a lawyer, abandoned the family when she was 10; as a teenager, negative body image issues manifested into bulimia. But it was her mother’s abusive post-marriage relationship that forced her to move to San Francisco on her own at 17, posing nude for artists while subsisting on “a diet of meth and oranges.” Her bisexuality emerged alongside a slow descent into drug abuse, which parlayed into dancing at a colorful assortment of San Francisco strip clubs catering to generous, fetishistic patrons. After a suicide attempt, Crane found the strength to attend substance abuse recovery meetings. With pride and exhilaration, she discusses her time pole dancing as “Lolita” and “Stevie,” as well as her activist involvement in the country’s first strip club unionization; the author does not express shame for a livelihood borne out of necessity and fascination. Crane even straddled sex work with a stint as a youth counselor, but when her mother became debilitated with cancer, she and her brother compassionately came to her aid and bestowed a dying wish in an excruciatingly sorrowful scene. However, she again yielded to the call of the street, traveling from Los Angeles to New Orleans. There’s a gripping emotional current coursing through Crane’s often startling material; the urgency and brazen honesty of her storytelling is difficult to ignore. Definitely not for the sheepish, Crane’s graphic life spent navigating gritty gentlemen’s clubs and massage parlors doesn’t end with catharsis but with unrepentant contentment.
A raw, searing self-portrait.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940207-06-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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