Those seeking depictions of graphic sex and the ins and outs of prostitution will dig Hof’s salacious memoir. Others should...
In this sex-drenched memoir, the proprietor of the Las Vegas brothel the Moonlite BunnyRanch spills his guts about the joys of running a stable of women.
Readers may think that such an individual would be completely unsavory, but as it turns out, he's only partly unsavory. Hof comes across less as a dirty old man—he's even a bit of a romantic, as witnessed by his lifelong pursuit of love—and more as a businessman, albeit one who is acutely aware of how and why his business works. (He was a regular BunnyRanch customer before he took it over in 1993.) Throughout the book, the author brings other voices to the mix to share their experiences of Hof and the BunnyRanch, including celebrity madam Heidi Fleiss, Chicago-based radio personality Mancow, a goodly number of the bunnies, and, most notably, porn legend Ron Jeremy, who infuses the proceedings with his trademark good-natured sleaze. The most emblematic portion of the book is an eight-page section in which Hof teaches Sunny Lane on how to be the finest whore she can be, going into graphic detail about how to get into a john's head and, most importantly, his wallet over and over again. Hof takes himself more seriously than one would expect, considering that one of his nicknames is "the P.T. Barnum of Booty," but that's probably why the BunnyRanch has thrived for the last two-plus decades under his watch—and it shows no sign of slowing down. All readers are aware that sex sells, and Hof unquestionably knows how to sell sex. Whether or not that's a good thing is for readers to decide.
Those seeking depictions of graphic sex and the ins and outs of prostitution will dig Hof’s salacious memoir. Others should steer clear.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-27-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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