Not always sure of its own stance on escorts, this book still offers an effective behind-the-scenes tour.
A debut memoir describes how a small-town Christian girl ends up running a Las Vegas escort agency, charging up to $1,500 an hour.
Growing up in a charismatic Pentecostal sect, Rodman wasn’t allowed to cut her hair, wear pants, or play (even watch) sports. But she always had a strong interest in sexuality; by age 5, she was masturbating “for two or three hours every day.” (Rodman mentions childhood molestation by an unidentified person but doesn’t dwell on it.) Eager to leave home, she married at 17 but quickly divorced. Rodman earned an associate degree in cultural anthropology and worked at an Oregon mental health facility, but after a wild weekend in Las Vegas, she wanted more of that adventure and moved to the city. She started out waitressing, then tried stripping. Broke, she agreed to a “private dance” and then to prostitution; after earning $1,000 for an afternoon, she made it her profession. She eventually headed her own escort agency until one of her most popular girls was outed as the Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton. In her memoir, Rodman reveals how high-end escorting works, from first contact to final payment. Through candid vignettes, readers get the lowdown on typical clients and their desires, from companionship to kinky, as well as different levels of prostitution, including girls, clients, and pimps. Throughout the book, Rodman veers between celebrating this life (freedom, easy money, being the center of attention) and criticizing it (degradation, anomie, addiction). She never really resolves this contradiction, disingenuously characterizing her own agency as “a professional screening and marketing firm” that “helped men find intimacy again.” But what’s being sold, as she shows from her own experiences, isn’t the give-and-take of true intimacy: “I want to feel in control of something in my life,” she imagines her wealthy, married client saying during sex. Few readers are likely to muster the sympathy for him that Rodman does.
Not always sure of its own stance on escorts, this book still offers an effective behind-the-scenes tour.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965682-0-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Maktub Press and Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Meet Norma Hazelton, connoisseur and collector of swizzle sticks. If you're not impressed by a plastic Jackie Gleason long since separated from its maraschino cherry, take a look at Robert Cade, inventor of Gatorade and a collector of Studebakers (re the carmaker's Dictator line of the 1930s, he says: ``Dictator was a good name until Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin. They dropped the Dictator line in 1937 because of them''). Among the 20 collections that Tuchman and photographer Brenner cast their eyes on are caches of Civil War memorabilia (a banjo, a musket, a toothbrush); aquarium furniture (a lot of mermaids); and representations of the Last Supper (a clock, a saltshaker, a funeral-home fan). Tuchman's text, mostly a pastiche of comments from the collectors themselves, is informative—and just glib enough to keep the whole book from feeling like a spooky visit to your mad Aunt Mabel's attic.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0360-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
A European woman who assumed the persona of a young male Tunisian student describes her remarkable journey into the Sahara in colorful and textured, albeit romanticized, vignettes. In 1897, Isabelle Eberhardt (The Oblivion Seekers, not reviewed), born and raised in Geneva, traveled with her mother to Tunis, where both converted to Islam. Eberhardt spent much of the rest of her life in Algeria; this work comes from notes she made during 1904 as they were later edited and published in France by Victor Barrucand. Despite this cleanup of the notes, some intriguing internal tensions remain: Eberhardt says her male persona (which Arabs respected, even when they saw through it) allows her to travel without attracting notice, but in a low moment she notes that she attracts disapproval. Near the Algeria-Morocco border, she muses with some pleasure that nobody knows precisely where the boundary is, yet soon (in one of the few hints at the region's volatility) she trades her Moroccan attire for Algerian to avoid annoying residents. When individuals and settings attract her eye she describes them vividly and concisely, whether she is passing a madman reciting verses from the Koran or taking tea with male students at a mosque. (Her garb ironically restricts her access to—and ability to learn about—women; interestingly, she seems not to mind.) Her observations on the play of light and color over the desert are made with an artist's eye, and her musings on travel and isolation reveal a pensive side. Yet far as she journeys, literally and metaphorically, she is still dogged by her prejudices: Jewish women cast ``provocative leers,'' and Jewish men possess ``insinuating and commercial abilities''; blacks can be ``repulsive'' and, when dancing, both ``childlike'' and ``barbarous.'' Though lacking a needed glossary for the many Arabic terms used, this slim volume makes a welcome addition to the information available on an extraordinary woman.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1994
ISBN: 0-7206-0889-9
Page Count: 120
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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