Better suited as a story told over beers.
Evans presents his true-life account of purchasing and operating a brothel in Panama.
Three high school buddies are grown up—in age, at least—and arriving at a midlife crisis. Angus, Jack and Evans—who wrote and narrates this biased account of real events—have been socially satisfied in youth, but they’ve grown depressed by the diminishing returns of California’s singles scene. Their advancing age doesn’t help, though the Viagra does. At their weekly sushi get-together, the trio plots a more reliable libidinous retreat—a trip to a Central American brothel where the women reciprocate for a price that doesn’t include rejection. Satisfied with the experience, the friends then jump at the chance to buy a brothel of their own in Panama, which Evans unconvincingly explains as a business opportunity rather than a wet dream. With little hesitation, the three friends become state-sanctioned pimps. Evans then ably answers the second question asked about a brothel (after “How much?”): How does it work? A few indulgences aside, he perceives prostitution strictly as a business, and runs it as such. Women selling themselves, which Evans perfunctorily argues is their right, is a resource for a successful business, akin to liquor licenses and Excel spreadsheets. Although Evans refuses to sleep with the prostitutes he employs because it would be bad for business, he claims that he could have bedded all 20 of them, perhaps at the same time. Despite his business savvy, Evans’ partnership with Angus and Jack slowly, then quickly, deteriorates. Rampant government corruption in Panama makes matters worse, as do obvious carnal distractions, until the ordeal climaxes in an unsexy mess of lawyers and politicians angling for bribes. After Angus and Jack abandon Evans by reneging on their ownership responsibilities, avarice and duplicity so easily replace their camaraderie that it brings the strength of the original friendship into question. Feeling especially victimized toward the end of the ordeal, Evans imagines Angus’ credo against him: “I want you to know that I disrespect you in a contemptuous manner!” The tension and resolution fall flaccid with stilted dialogue amid Evans’ overcompensation for a lack of literary charm.
Better suited as a story told over beers.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0976891574
Page Count: 348
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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