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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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