An engrossing panorama of porn’s heady past.
A celebrated porn director looks back on the bawdy soul of his genre’s golden age in this frank, psychologically probing debut memoir.
Brown, who left behind this manuscript upon his death in 2012, recounts his 1967 epiphany when, as a film hobbyist roaming New York City, he discovered legions of men, and some women, eager to pose suggestively for his 16-millimeter camera. Some allowed him to film them having sex, and what began as a fun outlet for his own fantasies burgeoned into a business with the rise of the hardcore pornography industry in the early 1970s—a time when porn films ran in theaters, had press screenings, and got notices in mainstream publications, such as Variety, Interview, and Esquire. (Appendices cover the author’s filmography and glowing reviews.) Brown, a gay man who made both gay and straight porn, portrays his films as exercises in sexual humanism with upbeat stories and an emphasis on his actors’ pleasure. Central to his productions was an extensive casting process featuring interviews with performers about what kinds of sexual practices and partners they liked, so he could couple compatible actors in genuinely erotic scenes. There is much explicit, though not sensationalistic, play-by-play, but the focus is on emotions and personalities: most of the book consists of vivid, well-observed profiles of porn actors in which Brown tries to suss out what makes them tick (and who makes them climax) by playing both therapist and matchmaker. “I wanted to use him but was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to find his perfect cowboy ideal for him,” he writes of one Marlboro Man–obsessed prospect. The result is a parade of quirky character studies, including cross-dressers, BDSM enthusiasts, brazen showoffs—one actress rented a print of a film in which she appeared, for a gathering of her friends—and introverts who blossom for the camera. The common thread, Brown contends, is their drive to self-actualize by becoming the stars of their own life stories. The author’s liberationist take on ’70s porn sometimes feels a tad idealistic, but his warm empathy and unblinking eye for psychosexual foibles keep it grounded.
An engrossing panorama of porn’s heady past.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937627-31-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Chelsea Station Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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