by Chelsea Haywood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2009
An entertaining but shallow read that reveals more about the author than Japan.
The high and low times of a temporary hostess in Japan.
At age 20, former model Haywood decided to travel to Tokyo with her husband Matt to write a book about the curious profession of hostessing. She soon found herself in the city’s infamous Roppongi district, where sex and other vices of all varieties are available for a price. With her blond good looks, she easily found a job at a club. Hostessing in Japan, she writes, “has very little to do with sex, quite a lot to do with psychology and nothing to do with prostitution.” Haywood and the other hostesses—from Europe, America and several places in between—spent long nights in the club fulfilling the fantasy of an adoring girlfriend for an endless parade of lonely, overworked “salary men.” Haywood lit their cigarettes, poured their drinks and listened with feigned interest to their complaints and dreams. There might be dinner outside the club, but it was all fantasy. For a lot of money, the author was “available but unobtainable,” the hostess motto. Still, some customers became friends or more than friends, including Nori, a rich doctor who became obsessed with Haywood; Shin, who became like her big brother; Koji, who may or may not have been a serial rapist; and Yoshi, a handsome, dashing, cocaine-snorting multimillionaire with whom Haywood began to fall in love. The author’s story begins to falter as it becomes more about her unconsummated affair with Yoshi and her struggles to choose between him and Matt. Beyond a discourse on burusera, the Japanese male obsession with schoolgirls and their uniforms, and a hilarious adventure as a dancer on a Japanese pop-music TV show, Haywood fails to delve into her encounters with Japanese culture. Ultimately the narrative becomes part bodice ripper, part teenage diary: e.g., Yoshi was a “groomed, polished, virile specimen…egotistical to the point of narcissism, yet he oozed an invisible nectar that made him irresistibly attractive.” After three months, burnt out from booze, lies and endless partying, Haywood returned to Canada with Matt.
An entertaining but shallow read that reveals more about the author than Japan.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-071-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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