by Dan Dunn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2011
Like a bender—starts out promisingly, becomes increasingly regrettable.
Fitfully amusing, ultimately annoying account of schmoozing and drinking on the liquor industry’s dime.
As Dunn never tires of proclaiming, he has a job many men would envy: “I get paid to crisscross the globe covering the adult beverage beat” for Playboy. His book blends memoir elements concerning his hardscrabble upbringing with magazine-style lists and primers (e.g. “Hangovers and How to Beat Them”) and, cleverly, 16 original cocktail recipes provided by esteemed professionals like Dale DeGroff. Dunn is at his most engaging when he’s humorously self-deprecating—readers may sense angst and self-doubt beneath his lucky-dog façade—or revealing cynical truths about the hedonism industry. “We booze journalists like to tell ourselves that we’re arbiters of some kind of high-minded gourmet sensibility,” he writes. “But the truth is the only reason we write about the good stuff is because rich people like to get fucked up on the good stuff, and they need someone to tell them about it.” Unfortunately, Dunn is not the sharpest writer, and he seems too preoccupied with his Playboy lifestyle to care—why craft prose that’s engaging or effective when you can brag about boorish behavior in Vegas and friendships with adult actresses and Tommy Lee? This results in a structurally incoherent, rambling narrative peppered with cardboard characters, constant asides that pierce the fourth wall and random repetition (an extended anecdote about having anal sex with an emotionally damaged woman by a Dumpster doesn’t really improve via emphasis). The book is replete with the misogyny of baffled adolescents (the women here are either unattainable nostalgic dreams or pornographic tramps) and downright hypocrisy (he mocks live-music venues and serious cocktail bars as pretentious, which clearly doesn’t apply to his industry pals who provided the drink recipes). By the time he gets around to bragging about his friendship with the late Hunter Thompson, readers will wonder why the author hasn’t developed the slightest insight into what made Thompson’s nonfiction special. Regardless, men who actually still read Playboy and Tucker Max fans may find this vicariously exciting.
Like a bender—starts out promisingly, becomes increasingly regrettable.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71847-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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by Dan Dunn
by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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