Occasionally titillating, more often tedious.
A debut memoir recounts a childhood spent at Hugh Hefner’s knee.
Saginor’s father was a close friend of the mogul, who actually gave him his own room in the Playboy Mansion. From the time Saginor was six, she and her younger sister spent a goodly amount of time there, even though their horrified mother got a court order to prevent her ex-husband from taking them to bunny-land. To no avail: the girls reveled in the attention their dad showered upon them; they loved playing in Hef’s game room; they loved having butlers at their service. So they lied to their mother about where they were, becoming pawns in a parental chess game. In high school, Saginor finally moved out of her mom’s house and in with dad. At the mansion she learned about cocaine and cunnilingus. She had a fling with a hunky young actor, but developed a much closer sexual and emotional relationship with one of Hef’s girlfriends, a woman she calls Kendall. Occasionally, Saginor made forays back into normal life at Beverly Hills High, but as the months rolled on, she invested more and more of herself in the Playboy world. Ultimately, she went east to college, where at friends’ homes she saw normal family life for the first time. Saginor concludes with her post-college return to L.A. “with a new set of eyes.” She sometimes still dropped by the Mansion, but only on special occasions. Overall, the story she tells is quite repetitive: sex, drugs, guns, more sex, more drugs, bouncing back and forth between the Mansion and high school, more sex, another gun. In addition, Saginor’s therapeutic revelations tend to the banal. She realizes that she had been seeking a mother figure in Kendall, and she shares with us the blinding revelation that “my parents may never be who I want them to be [but their] spirit will always be with me.”
Occasionally titillating, more often tedious.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-076156-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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