Sabarra’s multitiered chronicle is salacious and provocative yet also intimate on a whole different level.
The life and times of a randy Hollywood public relations guru.
Entrepreneur and television personality Sabarra’s spicy debut memoir begins with an awkward sexual episode (the first of many to come) and ends with a genuinely heartfelt epiphany. He writes of being a sensitive Jewish child growing up in South Florida, where the heat was oppressive. School and summer camp were uncomfortable, he says, for a precocious young boy who explored gay sex at an early age. The accompanying guilt and shame made him swear off sex until he was in his early 30s, despite his high sex drive. Compounding these issues was his burgeoning obsessive-compulsive disorder and a platonic affinity for women—particularly for his junior high school teacher Sylvia Bastaja, whose life would later end suddenly. As a young man, Sabarra took solace in food, ballooned to 175 pounds and underwent several fat-reduction surgeries. His fascination with film in college manifested itself in an internship at the soap opera Guiding Light. The baby-faced author honed his schmoozing technique on set with Hollywood stars and soon rocketed up the executive chain at a major Hollywood studio. The memoir’s sex scenes flow as freely as the lavish name-dropping after he comes out to his parents and begins to date again. However, the book’s G-rated anecdotes about his bar mitzvah, his trials in Little League baseball and his “Jewish T-Rex” college roommate are also delightfully funny, painting the author as a man who struggled with youthful insecurities but emerged as a gleefully self-confident adult. Sabarra also offers insider details about his tumultuous friendship with the actress and talk show host Ricki Lake and his flings with actor Alan Cumming, figure skater Johnny Weir and a deeply troubled porn star with mild Tourette’s syndrome, which leads to the book’s most undeniably moving scenes. The narrative’s pacing can be sluggish, and the book’s title is potentially misleading. However, that shouldn’t deter readers from picking up this heartfelt, honest autobiography.
Sabarra’s multitiered chronicle is salacious and provocative yet also intimate on a whole different level.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: JBS Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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