Puritans take note: Nothing is left to the imagination in this hypersexual memoir of life as a porn star.
The relentlessly risqué exploits of an award-winning adult film star.
Akira, an Asian-American porn actress who has starred in nearly 400 adult films, turns in a lascivious, personalized journey through the pornography industry—a provocative livelihood she has reveled in for over a decade. Akira is unapologetically prideful “for having the guts to indulge in my desires,” and the book is saturated with the intimate details of her life on the set of wet-and-wild porn shoots, her badass attitudes about others’ presumptions, navigating relationships (“omission isn’t lying”), and the frequently hilarious, surprisingly humbling anecdotes of a life spent having sex for the camera. Her X-rated hubris was definitely not passed down from the conservative, traditional Japanese parents who raised the New York native, nor was it a product of her private school education. She exposes years spent intensively experimenting with petty theft and heavy drugs, which began (and then ended) by the time she’d graduated high school. Akira then got her feet wet in the adult entertainment industry as a diffident dominatrix in a fetish fantasy club. Alive with an unconventional affinity for raw human sexuality, this exuberant memoir is effortlessly honest, without coming across as cavalier or catty. Her passion lies in the rush and the “high” of the perfectly filmed sex scene. Open-minded readers will find themselves bombarded by a carnal locomotive of industry insider secrets and amusing observations on everything from baby wipes to body odors and anal sex. Nothing, however, compares to an intoxicatingly graphic chapter of diary entries encapsulating 2012.
Puritans take note: Nothing is left to the imagination in this hypersexual memoir of life as a porn star.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2259-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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