A raunchy memoir revealing a visceral connection to the Bard.
With a fetish for being spanked, Keenan sees sex in nearly every Shakespearean play.
In her debut memoir, the author admits to being “obsessed with spankings.” Her fetish, she writes, “isn’t something I do. It’s something I am.” She has no interest in ferreting out the cause of “this bizarre obsession,” finding introspection “exhausting….The psychological and social implications of my inner life were so disturbing to me that I could rarely force myself to confront them.” Instead, her sexuality informs her reading of Shakespeare. In The Tempest, for example, she identifies with the wild Caliban. “I longed for Caliban because I longed to uncage myself, and the ravenous sexual terrors in me….I longed for Caliban’s ugly honesty and the unselfconsciousness of his impulses.” Keenan is captivated by the “erotic potential” of cross-dressing in Twelfth Night, which speaks to her “specific erotic quirks to an absurd degree.” Besides offering her take on 14 plays, including Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, Romeo and Juliet (it’s about lust, not love, the author insists), King Lear, Othello, and, not surprisingly, The Taming of the Shrew, Keenan provides graphic recountings of her sexual liaisons. In Spain, where she went after dropping out of high school, she met John, who fulfilled her needs repeatedly and energetically, with his bare hand, a belt, and a ruler, with which he paddled her “hard, thirty or forty times in rapid succession” and then, after a short break, 10 more. The author maintains that she could control how much, or how long, the spanking continued. “Kink is more collaborative than it appears,” she writes. When she fell in love, she was unsatisfied by sex until she persuaded her lover to spank her. One day, he improvised, spanking her “to the rhythm of iambic pentameter.” Reader, she married him.
A raunchy memoir revealing a visceral connection to the Bard.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-237871-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
