Fans of the Fifty Shades series will undoubtedly find much to savor in this ribald, risqué, and captivating remembrance.
Holistic sexuality educator and coach LaVey shares a life rich with experimentation and eroticism.
Early on in this debut memoir, the author writes dramatically of boarding a bus in New Hampshire—the beginning of years of nomadic wanderings in such locales as Wisconsin (where she pursued a Wiccan-Shamanistic apprenticeship), Pennsylvania, and Central America. She also writes of the happiness and complexity of raising a child as a single parent. However, the memoir centers on LaVey’s sexual awakening, which started when she began a career as an exotic dancer. She entertainingly depicts these early days, graphically describing the pain of a first waxing, wobbling on 6-inch heels “like a giraffe on stilts,” and mastering the art of making money at a strip club. “Stripping walked me down the aisle to kink,” she writes, and her chronicle smoothly transforms into an account of her participation in BDSM subculture. Along the way, she vividly describes sexual experiences, a botched romance, and successfully overcoming drug addiction. She also weaves in the incremental evolution of her dominatrix persona, “Evil Kitty,” as well as varied ruminations about the nature of religion and the intricate dance of sexual dominance and submission. LaVey’s prose has an unfettered honesty as she proudly displays the joys, scars, triumphs, disappointments, and hard-won lessons of her lifestyle. The tone of the narrative is educational and never judgmental or arrogant, allowing readers to understand the author on several different levels—as the daughter of a demanding mother, as a devoted parent, as a dedicated sex worker, and as a formidable, respected person.
Fans of the Fifty Shades series will undoubtedly find much to savor in this ribald, risqué, and captivating remembrance.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-435-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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