Surprisingly dull for a book about a woman whose job it is to sell fantasies.
A fictionalized account of the making of a madam, by the author of the memoir Callgirl (2004).
Peach, known in private life as Abby, was raised in Charleston, S.C., and came north to attend Emerson College. Strapped for money, she took a job working the phones in a brothel, learned the ropes, then headed out to run her own escort service. Few of her clients, or the callgirls she sends out to them, ever meet her. She does her work by telephone, and, though she prides herself on being supportive of the “girls,” insisting they call her once they arrive and as they are leaving (and immediately if they encounter any trouble), she still has little sense of their lives or even what they look like. Meanwhile, Peach is having her own torrid time with men like Jesse, a California stud who treats her badly, and Benjamin, a musician she takes home one night. He stays around and by the end becomes a stabilizing force in her life. Along the way, Peach describes clients like the man who orders a blowjob and a newspaper delivered to his hotel room, a sweet fellow whose wife has recently died of cancer, and the steady client who is demanding, pathetic and clings onto the dream that a girl will fall in love with him, even though he behaves like a boor. “Jeannette,” a callgirl who has quit, married and become a writer (i.e., the author) makes several cameo appearances. Despite Peach’s references to Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty and other writers, her own tale is pedestrian. At the end, when Peach has married Benjamin and has a five-year-old, she’s just another working mom, juggling too many details and worried about keeping her clients loyal. The client’s “real relationship is with me, and he knows it,” she confides. “I’m part Mother Confessor, part dominatrix.”
Surprisingly dull for a book about a woman whose job it is to sell fantasies.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-116-3
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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