A nasty little memoir of sex and self-indulgence, for those eager for some upscale titillation.
If this breezy account of one woman’s sexual escapades were a film, it would definitely be rated NC-17.
Hayt, a fashion writer for the New York Times, goes public about her private parts, not to mention those of her various premarital, marital and extramarital partners. She begins with her wedding, declaring that “it felt like the start of a long prison sentence,” then flashes back to her days as a promiscuous teenager. Predictably, marriage to the unadventurous Charlie foundered within a few years, and Hayt’s search for adulterous sexual fulfillment began. At 32, she got pregnant by another man and had an abortion; by the time she was 34, she and Charlie had separated. Still supported by her estranged husband, newly renovated by Botox injections, dermabrasion, plastic surgery and breast implants, she launched herself at a series of men: the art dealer who left his shoes on during sex and had cold, green reptilian eyes; the media mogul with an aversion to bathing; the billionaire politico who was a lousy kisser; the right-wing oil magnate who wore lizard-skin footwear. Guessing their identities should give readers some amusement. In addition to blind dates and chance encounters, Hayt tried finding men through personal ads in the New York Observer, at her synagogue and in the men’s department at Bergdorf Goodman; the results were frequently disastrous and, as told here, extremely funny. Her excruciatingly detailed play-by-plays of her sexual antics are not so amusing, and it comes as no surprise that her husband, on the verge of a reconciliation as the narrative nears its end, changed his mind after reading her tell-all manuscript.
A nasty little memoir of sex and self-indulgence, for those eager for some upscale titillation.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53194-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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