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
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders—well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists—those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)—might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-42366-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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