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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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