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
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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